Liz Truss

[Collywobblewobbles]

Am I being unreasonable to start to question Liz Truss' sanity?

OK I've put this in Aibu but it's a serious question, she honestly comes across as if she doesn't have a foot in reality and, as a former PM and current politician, it's a serious & genuine question.

She believes an extremist Islamic party is at risk of winning a local election, she believes Trump-oh-please-Mr-Putin-feel-free-to-bomb-Nato-states is the single best thing for the safety of the West and whenever she's asked a question which she can't or doesn't want to answer she just acts like nothing has been said and does this weird smile into nothingness.

There's calculated political moves to extend your career and then there's the strange machinations and declarations which we see from her, it's just.....so bizarre.

I'm just beginning to wonder if she's living in some sort of fantasy-world.

If someone can shed some rational light onto her actions then please do because I'm at a loss!

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.

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.

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.