Liz Truss

All I know is that I put money on her being the shortest serving PM up to start of the 20th century and I should have gone back further.

Markets are about confidence. She might convince a few nutters Tufton Street but plenty of other people knew her limitations. And they are huge. It was only a question of time that this was exposed to a much larger audience.

You’re doing what truss did @CoatRack. In theory, yes cutting taxes theoretically encourages economic growth but the conditions at the time weren’t right for cutting taxes - borrowing was high and projected to stay high amidst conditions following the pandemic, unrest in Europe and an energy crisis. Truss and Kwatang didn’t address any of that beyond ‘tax cuts will grow the economy’.

A large part of the Tories downfall (imho) has been their inability to adapt their ideologies to conditions. They’ve addressed issues as if we’re a country starting from a point of financial stability when we’ve made huge shifts that have destabilised the country, even if it’s only hopefully short term.

Tell me what you want to know and I'll try to help, but my overall take is that there are lots of moving parts which in and of themselves are not necessarily complicated. Each moving part is a person, which makes them moveable yet unreliable.
(This means there is rarely a "correct" answer to things, though I myself land on the Austrian side of most matters.)

This applies to markets, such as the ones used by the government to borrow money, and in which many pension funds participate. So if you get a country's media all screaming in unison that a budget announcement is going to tank the economy and we're all going to die, then many people will react to that. If nothing is said, then they will probably not react at all.

This is my thinking behind much of the budget response, as stated earlier; and I think it was used to cease her plans and depose her.

IMO the actual contents of the budget were a good thing i.e. lower taxes etc. and would lead to the good kind of economic growth. There are lots of data to say that lowering taxes results in greater revenue, and it follows logically.

For instance, to my mind the first thing that should have been done after Brexit is remove corporation tax entirely (Liz wanted to reverse a future increase to 25%, currently 19%). Why you would want to make doing business in the UK both expensive and awkward is beyond me.

That’s very little comfort when your MP’s a madwoman with a 26k majority.

You need to really dig into the stats. Overall Tory voters are dying (possibly of shame or embarrassment) at a faster rate than non-Tory voters. There will be outliers.

I agree. She was and is shit, but there is no way possible she was solely responsible for trashing our economy. The crash was underway before she came PM. For example inflation was shooting up months beforehand.

Rishi should have taken far more the blame. He was a terrible chancellor. I don’t know why he’s not being held to account for the many mistakes he made, but think he got lucky as Johnson was more of a train wreck so he wasn’t exposed. He was incompetent.

My take on Liz Truss is that she looks very shy and awkward. I don't think that makes someone unfit for office in itself, and we shouldn't base our choices of leader on who can look natural in front of a camera.

She has that startled rabbit in the head lights look that I always have when someone points a camera at me.

I don't think she is fit for office - but that is not based on her social clumsiness

but the fact that the standard narrative is that she is the main reason for your mortgage going up is just not true

narrative endures. Labour are still the unions whipping boy and the country will grind to a halt through strikes because of the 70’s, Gordon Brown will forever be responsible for the global financial crash and a fool for selling off the country’s gold, Labour will alway be the shysters who left a note in the treasury saying all the money has gone.

if you are even loosely associated with something that hits people’s pockets that’s your legacy. Facts rarely make a difference, opinion and intangible likelihoods even less.

Unfortunately that’s probably not the case here, it’s a retirement hotspot and so the “natural wastage” is quickly replaced.

Yes, I thought that after seeing her being interviewed at CPAC in the US. Used to be a broad church "conservative" conference but in recent years it's become dominated by Trump's MAGA people and now also features avowed neo-Nazis and white supremacists. And there was Liz Truss - the former LibDem and Remainer - as an enthusiastic part of it.

There is an interesting graph showing that as months go by "natural wastage" is reducing the Tories share of the vote more than any other parties.

https://twitter.com/Samfr/status/1761745491010671034

That’s awful 😞 sorry to hear it, @Gipil

I’ve been telling friends from other areas how awful she is for years, particularly during the run up to her becoming PM. I think that they thought that I just hated the Tory party (I do) but at least they believe me now!

She’s my MP ☹️ and has been re-selected and is likely to get voted in again because all of the incomer Tory pensioners keep voting for her because they’re scared of Labour. She has done nothing for the area, isn’t here most of the time and didn’t even bother to campaign for the last election because her majority was so assured.

Which is worse ? The madwoman ? Or the people that voted for them ?

Liz Truss was foisted on us because enough people voted Tory. Reason enough to swerve that party. Possibly forever.

This is a very basic explanation (mainly because I don’t really understand what happened with the budget!)

My basic understanding of what happened is that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng wanted to make a huge amount of unfunded tax cuts in the budget.

I think their plan was to fund the tax cuts through the ‘trickle-down’ economic approach, which Truss loved talking about at the time. This seemed to involve creating wealth and growing economy through cutting the taxes of the wealthy, therefore letting them spend more of their money and letting that money enter the rest of the economy to benefit everyone. The ‘trickle down’ approach seems to be quite controversial - understandably, especially since the budget - and lots of people think it’s a parody economic theory that was never intended to be taken seriously.

As mentioned, these tax cuts in the budget were unfunded, as they didn’t have a plan for how they would pay for them. This frightened the markets and business world, because the economy and the markets like predictability and routine and are allergic to any kind of risk, and then destabilised the economy.

I've always thought that the elevation of this mad-as-a-box-of-frogs fucking woman to PM was a deliberate ploy by Johnson to ensure that whoever succeeded him was sooooooo fucking shit that they would make him look good by comparison.

I don't know how he did it or why anyone went along with it, but that's my conspiracy theory out there.

A friend took me to a Tory event once, and she sat next to us and started talking during someone else's speech; she was and is batshit crazy. I could never have voted for her; it's a sad thing that the Tory MPs put her on the ballot. She was 3rd through most rounds. It's such a pity she kicked Mourdent out. a contest between her and Sunak wouldn't have been too bad.

Exactly 🙂

I never said I was beyond question, and very little of my post is opinion. The facts are the facts and I've made my subsequent reasoning quite clear. I'm happy for people to disagree with me about my conclusions but I would also like to know why they think that. How else do we learn?

Rishi was not elected, ergo he was installed. If you wonder why I think this way, it's because the politicians and the media very rarely send out the exact same messaging on a topic. When they do, I get suspicious and I start looking into things for myself.

This happened here and it turns out there's a lot more to it, and I think it's important. I am in no way interested in defending Liz per se, but pinning it all on her deflects from the atrocious economic decisions made by Boris and Rishi himself. I think they should both be in prison for various reasons.

You can make the argument that the budget still caused trouble etc. and that's fine (I think I said in my post that she should have done it differently), but the fact that the standard narrative is that she is the main reason for your mortgage going up is just not true.

Apologies again for all the paragraphs!

It's possible, though a bounce doesn't necessarily mean the bottom would have been in without intervention, markets don't move in a straight line. Regardless we can both agree the damage was brief but we still hear today that she's responsible for the current rates.

Thank you for saying so. Obviously nobody knows for sure what would have happened if no measures had been taken.

From looking at the numbers and the sequence of events I personally believe that it would have returned to trend once the markets got used to it. Your mileage for this may vary.

My rationale is that the BOE's own data say that the peak had almost completely subsided before they announced the purchases, which was about 1 week later IIRC. This says to me that neither the measures nor even the promise of them was the reason for it.

I work in Finance. Coatrack you are largely correct aside from the inevitability of the events immediately after the mini budget. It was rather the BoE's (and later government's) response to the 'mini-budget' which shored up the financial system very quickly. The £ had recovered to pre budget levels within a couple of weeks.