Simon Youel

Rishi's Sunak NFT should not only make us cringe, but also worried that a supposedly serious government has drunk the cryptobro koolaid Me for @openDemocracy's @_ourEconomy opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/…

@baylissbaghdad @PMarlowe1939 "highly original, brilliantly written and disturbing persuasive" would perhaps be appropriate feedback if this was handed in as a gcse essay

This is a highly original, brilliantly written and disturbingly persuasive piece by @PMarlowe1939 about bond markets, and how nations 'in hock' to them have to navigate fiscal policy differently. Highly recommended reading. thecritic.co.uk/im-worried-abo…

@willuminare @DespoticInroad Not sure getting MPs to play with sex toys in Parliament is going to encourage many people to sleep together

@DespoticInroad good luck repairing it if people aren’t sleeping together!

Or you could just repair the country I dunno

As the transatlantic alliance falters, there’s a new kind of military Keynesianism emerging from Labour’s “Anglo-Gaullist” circles. Rearmament will, they say, deliver us from our broken, post-2008 growth model & produce a manufacturing renaissance/industrial revival. It’s a delusion. There are few worse ways to catalyse growth than defence spending. Its multipliers are weak + long-term productivity benefits are non-existent. Better to build true resilience, & channel £££ into infrastructure, capital projects, R&D & fixed public assets, not another MoD procurement money pit. Before we restore our ability to “project influence” abroad, perhaps we should think about how to raise living standards/real wages for the first time in 2 decades at home?🤔 Time to drop the post-imperial delusions, Bevinite nostalgia & the “Gaullist” posture & start thinking like a developing country. ANGLO-DENGISM over Anglo-Gaullism, Comrades!: look inwards, build, develop, grow, Make Britain Rich Again. FULL ARTICLE👉👉👉 unherd.com/2026/04/what-t…

Bit of a brass neck on Reeves here in her Mais lecture. Don't recall her or Labour shouting about the priceless opportunity to invest in the early 2010s - quite the opposite

It's a time honoured tradition in the UK: everyone with ambitions to become Prime Minister has to go to the City of London, and promise not to do anything.

Bond Markets Breathe Sigh Of Relief As Keir Starmer's Future As Prime Minister Becomes Less Tenable

If I was a political journalist who started paying attention to gilt yields around 3 years ago I would be liable to interpret this as the bond markets screaming for Keir Starmer to go

@paulmasonnews Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha come on man labour are not going to give you a job. They're not going to have enough seats!

Spot on! The Green leadership are useful weirdos 👇🏽

@AaronBastani I've heard it said that she was a very capable right winger at Camden Council - wonder what happened!

Georgia Gould is easily the worst media performer in the cabinet. A significant L for Westminster nepobabies.

@RachelReevesMP Why was this? Could it be because of lobbying from banks (eerily similar to that advised by Peter Mandelson), as uncovered by @EJShone93 for @openDemocracy ? opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-…

@RachelReevesMP This would have brought in more than the stealth income tax rises - yet the Chancellor made a choice to raise taxes on workers rather than banks.

Now that HSBC have reported 2025 results I calculate that @RachelReevesMP could've brought in *£12.5bn* from the UK's big 4 banks alone by taxing their net income from domestic retail depositors above a threshold of £800m at a 38% rate (in line with the oil & gas windfall tax)

@meadwaj Though they believe other policies from the Budget will end up having a positive contribution to CPI

More scenes from the death of neoliberalism: Bank of England ratesetters admit price controls can help bring inflation down. (Link to story below.)

@AaronBastani How does a capitalist economy grow without debt?

It’s all debt. US economy grew by $6 trillion 2020-24. Meanwhile it’s national debt increased by $12 trillion. In 1950s state spending in American economy had a multiplier effect of 5-1. Now it’s…0.5-1 💀

Did an asteroid filled with Bitcoin hit the earth?

At the high point of Paul Mason’s journalistic career, he was urging Syriza to rebel against the European financial institutions crushing Greek democracy. Now he wants Starmer to remain prime minister forever in case we upset the bond markets.

I agree with much of what Oren Cass says here. A growing and increasingly sophisticated financial sector can benefit the economy by reducing frictional costs associated with the flow of capital, and so improving the efficient allocation of capital. But only up the a point. Beyond that point, increasing the sophistication of the financial markets and lowering frictional cost further has small and diminishing returns for investors in the real economy. It however hugely benefits speculative capital flows, which increasingly drive the overall direction of finance. As that happens, capital flows in the real economy are likely to be more and distorted by rising volumes of speculative flows, the result of which may be that finance becomes increasingly harmful for the real economy even as it becomes increasingly profitable for bankers. I say this with some reluctance. I spent much of my career running bond trading and capital markets desks for major Wall Street banks, but while my friends and I were very profitable and extremely well paid, I’d have real trouble today arguing that our contributions to global growth exceeded our cost to the economy. nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opi…

In the UK you can be held for 18 months without a trial and they can re-try you in perpetuity until they get the result they want.

Yes

Starmer wanted to bring this guy into the government and make him investment minister 🤯