Mark O'Brien

@SarcasticForest Could be worse. We went through a period where whenever we got a corner, the other team immediately went up the other end and scored.

Man United should spend the rest of the afternoon volleying the ball out for a corner. Will be a comfortable afternoon for them. We are the worst at set pieces in the league. #nffc

Gary Neville selling Anderson to Man Utd. Predictable. #nffc

Can anyone explain to me why Israel and only Israel is able to order people from another country to evacuate their home? Anyone? Israel has issued an evacuation order for Tyre, Lebanon, displacing 200,000 more people. Tyre is an ancient Phoenician city with Roman ruins and a hippodrome.

What could possibly go wrong?

If you have this weird gut feeling that the rich pay little tax in the US, your gut is spot on... Source: nytimes.com/interactive/20…

oddly, not a single news outlet will ask: how we gonna pay for it?!

@ZackPolanski @GreenmanMick or is deliberately choosing not to.

Keir Starmer is correct about the need to heal divisions. But to equate protest of the genocide in Gaza with the hate march led by Tommy Robinson is a disgrace. If Starmer thinks this is how we heal divisions it shows he hasn't begun to understand the problem.

First, “the markets” do not care whether the budget is “in balance” in the abstract. Bond pricing is not a moral referendum on fiscal tidiness. It reflects expected Bank Rate, expected inflation, term premia, liquidity conditions, regulatory demand, pension-fund behaviour, global portfolio preferences, collateral demand, and the expected path of nominal income. A government can run deficits for decades and still have low yields; it can also run a balanced budget and suffer a currency or banking crisis. The relevant question is not “is spending in balance?” but “what is the macroeconomic and institutional setting?” Second, you import a household-creditor model into a monetary-sovereign state. The UK government does not “borrow money” in the same sense that a firm or household does. It issues sterling liabilities: bank notes, reserves, NS&I savings bonds, Treasury bills, gilts within a sterling monetary system whose unit of account it defines. Gilt issuance is not the state rummaging around for money it lacks; it is a liability-management operation: exchanging one form of state liability for another. The risk on sterling gilts is therefore not ordinary insolvency risk, but interest-rate risk, inflation risk, duration risk, and political/institutional risk. Third, “creditors will assess whether they will get it back” is misleading in the UK case. Holders of gilts are not concerned that the UK will be technically unable to credit sterling to their accounts at maturity. They are worried about the real value of what they receive, future interest-rate paths, inflation, and whether they can sell the gilt at a reasonable price before maturity. A different argument. Fourth, the “markets punish imbalance” claim is selective history. The Liz Truss episode was not simply “the deficit was too large”; it was Bank Rate expectations, sterling weakness, and a forced-selling crisis in leveraged LDI pension strategies. It was not an eternal bond-market law saying “Left spending bad” or “Right tax cuts bad”; it was a specific market-structure and credibility shock. Fifth, the debt interest is also an income flow to the private sector: pension funds, insurers, banks, overseas holders, and households indirectly. It is not money fired into the sun. The distributional question matters: who receives it, and what else could have been done with the fiscal space? But describing it merely as the cost of “past debt” hides the fact that it is also current income for gilt holders and that the gilts etc will be inherited by future generations as a financial asset. Sixth, your comparison with education and defence needs care. It is a significant fiscal transfer, but your framing is designed to make the state appear like a maxed-out household credit card. A fallacy. In sum, the bond market is not a Victorian bank manager checking whether the household books are balanced. In a sterling system, gilts etc are state liabilities issued as part of monetary and reserve management. The real constraint is inflation and productive capacity, not whether the spreadsheet performs moral virtue.

Gutted for Hearts. They seemed to step back and not really offer any threat in the second half rather than continue how the first went. Shame.

@NFFC Home shirt. Love pin stripes even on the away shirts with the colours reversed.

Here’s your chance to win a host of Forest goodies! 🛍️ Follow our page and comment below your favourite Forest kit from this season. 👇

They removed CD/DVD drives from devices. They made physical media harder to buy and use. They removed expandable storage from phones. They pushed us into streaming subscriptions. They made always-online normal. They made unlimited internet necessary. Then slowly raised the price of everything. Ownership quietly became renting.

Nigel Farage was paid to let Boris Johnson win. Now the same donor is paying Nigel Farage to win, and Nigel Farage's cabinet is filled with people from Boris Johnson's cabinet. It's the same old shit reheated and fed back to you.

78 years ago, 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes. Britain made it possible. Today, Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Britain made it possible. 78 years of the Nakba - and 78 years of British complicity in crimes against the Palestinian people.

Corbyn was an MP for 32 years until he was elected Labour leader in 2015. Number of accusations in the media of antisemitism from 1983-2015 = 0 Number of accusations in the media of antisemitism from 2015-19 = 11,251 Media Lens on how the establishment is revisiting its smear campaign, this time against the Greens, to stop a leftwinger from reaching power: medialens.substack.com/p/starmageddon…

The bond market is being treated by the media as if it has a veto over any Labour move to the left. The media are, then, complicit in the whole conspiracy to make sure democracy cannot deliver what people want and need so that the wealthy might gain. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

@nottmtails MGW's big plus is that he has already won a Euros and World Cup. The experience of having been there and done it will make him calmer when things get tense.

For me, he should be in the squad. Are Foden and Palmer more talented players? At their best, probably. But they have been far from their best this season. MGW is in outstanding form, producing consistently influential performances. And he has an understanding with Anderson.

Morgan Gibbs-White could return to stake his claim for a place at the World Cup at Manchester United on Sunday. The #NFFC midfielder is in Thomas Tuchel's 55-man squad, but will hope to convince him he deserves a place on the plane. nytimes.com/athletic/72791…

The McSweeney/Starmer strategy was for Labour to out-reform Reform and treat progressive voters with contempt. We warned this would smash up Labour's voter coalition - and let Reform in. New polling shows that's what happened last week. Labour's vote "disproportionately stayed at home or went to another left party."

99.9% of products have constant or falling marginal costs. The textbooks say the opposite. 71 surveys. Every single one found the same result. And neoclassical economists have responded by literally ignoring it. Supply and demand is not a model of how the economy works. It is a model of how economists wish the economy worked. I break the whole thing down in the video given below. #Economics #SteveKeen #PostKeynesian #HeterodoxEconomics #EconomicTheory youtube.com/watch?v=6H68Ru…

Watching journalists explain why the bond markets should effectively decide who runs the country. Sounds like: we don't need elections. Just ask the traders. Don't let them sell you this nonsense. It's the establishment's favourite trick, outsource democratic decisions to unelected financial markets and pretend it's just how things work. It isn't.