Update on the bank stress-tests ‘leak’

This story that I posted about a couple of months ago entitled I May Be Lazy but at Least I’m not Journalist Lazy.  In it, I chastized the major mainstream media for not doing the basics in verifying a stupid rumour posted on some right-wing nutjob blog that turned out to be plagiarized from a press release that had been sent out a week or so earlier – basically two minutes seaching google and one could have easily discreditied the whole story.

Well now, that story just got a little weirder.  This Hal Turner, who had a reputation as not just a right-wing nutjob blogger, but a white-supremacist nutjob blogger got arrested for inciting violence on his nutjob blog.

More reason for nobody to have paid attention to anything he ever wrote, right?

Well, it turns out this guy is launching a rather interesting defence. It seems Hal Turner was trained by the FBI to be an agent provocateur – posting racist loony rants inciting acts of violence in order to bring the REAL racist violent loonies out of the woodwork so that the FBI could round them up and arrest them.

No to defend racists, but isn’t that bordering on entrapment?  Never mind, I don’t really care and that’s not the point of this post.

 Whether Hal Turner was really an FBI secret agent or not will presumeably come out at his trial at some point. Even back when the infamous stress test ‘leaks’ were being posted there were forum commenters who said he was an FBI shill so the claim didn’t just arise upon his arrest.

It still does beg the yet-to-be-answered question: WHAT THE HELL was the main stream media doing taking his ’stress test leaks’ blog posting seriously in the first place?

Whether he was just another hateful whack job or an FBI plant, the idea that one of his dubious and easily discredited rantings got so much media play back in April is alarming, to say the least.

Supply side scare story on Bloomberg today, or if I were still a Londoner

I lived in London about a decade ago, but if I was still there I’d have one thing to say to these people: Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out!

Bloomberg today had an article about how American expats living in London are reportedly leaving the city in droves due to a new tax being brought in on top earners.  They start with the example of a 29 year old packing up and claiming that he’s the last to leave, that he knows of. 

At any rate, the most telling part of the ideological bent of the article is here, where the main subject of the article  joined the exodus of American expatriates fleeing high taxes and the city’s shrinking financial industry. 

One can almost see Moses himself leading the newly unshackled Americanites away from the penury of  Dickensian workhouse.

Of course, this tax is levied at those who’ve been living in the UK for at least seven years, with an annual income of over £150,000.  Has the main subject of the article really been living there for that long and do all his friends really make over that amount? 

As expected (by me, at least) the numbers are rather vague.  The number of US citizens living in the UK fell by 3.8% but people move for all kinds of reasons including homesickness, job loss, a better job elsewhere, needed to look after sick parents, or for that matter, a devaluing pound.

The article then cites a woman married to a Greek man about their plans to return to Greece once their daughter is finished school. They too are fed up with all the taxes in London.  How much better the business opportunities are in Greece, naturally, go unmentioned.

The only other personal story in the article involved someone fed up with the crowds in London, whose employer-expatriate benefits had just been dramatically slashed. Oh, and business was down for them too. He probably wouldn’t have earned enough to qualify for the new tax anyway.

What’s particularly odd from strictly a numbers point of view is that London has for as long as I can remember, been an obscenely expensive place to live.  When I left in the late 90s the property bubble was only just beginning to inflate but at the height had become pretty insane.  That bubble, like inflated property prices everywhere else in the world (except Vancouver and Toronto – I’m sure it’s ‘different’ there) have fallen sharply since then. This means, that even with the higher taxes, cost of living would be presumeably offset by lower housing costs. 

But I guess not – in supply-sider world, paying out plenty more for luxury items or swanky flats is a-ok but that same amount going to the government (often to pay for the very things that enable people to get rich and keep their wealth in the first place) is an unforgivable evil.   

But the message of the article is clear regardless of how flimsy the actual facts to back it up might be: raise taxes and all the ‘talent’ will go somewhere with lower taxes and that’s really the only thing that distinguishes one part of the world from anywhere else. 

Contarary to what American news publications might suggest, they are also not the only ones capable of generating economic productivity in the world and I somehow doubt that whenever actual economic recovery does happen in Britain and elsewhere in the world that it will be any harder for companies to attract ‘talent’ than it was a couple of years ago.