A decent man in a snakepit Stephen Timms is Financial Secretary to the Treasury. He is also a calm, intelligent, decent man. How do we know? Because once in a another lifetime, Tyler used to see him regularly in a financial services customer/supplier relationship. An unlike certain other customers, ...

Defending the public realm David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, puts it in a nutshell: "Across the country I am hearing more and more businesses left with no choice but to freeze and cut pay. It is unacceptable that the public sector should not share any of this pain. T...

By 1956 the promise was already meaningless With the Bank of England about to start Quantitative Easing (on some definitions, it has already started), the printing presses will soon be roaring. The money supply is already growing at nearly 20% pa so God knows how high it will go. And inflation? The ...

Welcome to your allocated supermarket In a stunning U-turn, Commissar Bollocks today ordered an official enquiry into state supermarket lotteries. Until now, lotteries have been the Commissariat's preferred method of allocating limited shopper places at popular supermarkets. But in the face of new f...

Armageddon outa here Back from a week's admin leave thinking maybe it had all been a terrible dream. Surely we can't really be in the Second Great Depression. Surely our High Street banks can't really be bust. And surely even this government can't really have hocked my unborn grandchildren to the Ch...

He'll need the big ones As we all understand by now, public spending will have to be cut drastically after the next election. Brown will leave us with a legacy of debt that we will be paying off for decades, and short of taxing the economy into oblivion, public spending will have to slashed. But how...

Come on out Baloney All Points Bulletin : Federal marshals today issued international warrants for the arrest of discredited money men Tony Baloney Bliar and Gordy The Gob Brownoff... wanted on charges relating to the collapsed hedge fund, UK plc... 128 separate counts of fraud, embezzlement, grand ...

Eat, drink, and be merry Last evening Tyler dined in the City with a group of ex-colleagues. A day on which the Prime Minister had banned bank bonuses, the FTSE had sagged further, and more skeletons had clattered out of the financial fraud cupboard. Yet the restaurant was packed. What's more, it wa...

Quick nurse! He's fading. Give him another shot! As regular readers will know, we think the current desperate attempts to stop the pain at any price will result in a return to 70s style inflation. Back in the era of platform boots, we learned the hard way that high inflation can easily exist alongsi...

The joke is he winds up as Prime Minister I want you to imagine a parallel universe. A universe where everything is pretty much the same as it is here, except for one small detail - somehow Big Government actually works (yes, I know it's far-fetched, but just try, OK?). Now imagine a visitor from th...