Another long pause while I've been deserted by the blogging muse. This is partly being busy and partly losing any sense of where current affairs are headed.

Despite the relative busy-ness on the work front, I've fitted in a walk (in fact it may be two walks - can't remember if the first one was covered in the previous post). The first one was a walk from home because I was temporarily without a car. This made it a mainly familiar walk although I did manage to lose myself on the local common - it can only be the size of a couple of football pitches but it's densely wooded. The adjacent common was the location of a giant Canadian army camp during World War One but there seems to be nothing to mark that fact.

The more recent walk was from Grayswood up towards the Devil's Dyke and must be the most gradual ascent possible. By the finish, you're about 850 feet up and have great views to the South Downs. It was a lovely sunny afternoon. The way back wasn't as satisfactory; it goes through Forestry Commission land and the (permissive) footpath is a quagmire. Presumably the commission don't often have to use their footpath themselves.

==========================================================
I don't have a take on current politics; just a few random thoughts:

I've just been reading an interview with Adam Posen, member of the Monetary Policy Committee, where he says that more quantitative easing may be necessary and that British banks may need to be broken up. He also seems worried that the toxic asset problems of RBS and Lloyds won't be fixed before the QE programme has to be reversed. This seems puzzling in view of the fact that we've been hearing so much about the government's plan to insure these assets. Anyway, it looks as if there's some kind of accounting crunch heading the way of the part-state-owned banks.

The paper(Sunday Times) is very concerned about bankers' pay and rightly so. It seems obvious that these big bonuses are not going to continue. Investment bankers may not be no better than gamblers but, equally, quite a lot of them have achieved through taking gambles in the recent past and that game is more or less over. Their bluff needs to be called; there can't truly be a true job's market where some people's skills are worth so much more than others'.

I've been working on an article about bond exchange traded funds recently and hence weighing up what the media has to say about the direction of interest rates. Bond prices denominated in Sterling seem to have priced in more inflation expectations than, say, those denominated in the euro. This seems realistic but possibly slightly overdone. After all, if the government tries to spend too much money, or borrow too much or do anything else that the global financial community doesn't like the look of, there'll be a run on the pound. The UK has until when the rest of the world feels that fears of a depression are safely in the past and then financial constraints are going to be a lot tighter. This will probably happen just about the time of next year's general election.

Speaking of which, the Scottish Nationalists look as if they are going to make a miscalculation about the amount of leverage they can have in a hung Parliament. The other parties, even ones that might sell the Union down the river, are going to be too worried about a budget crisis and or a currency crisis to be leant on by the Nationalists for extra funding for Scotland.

I liked Harriet Harman's comparison of the allowances repayments, being demanded of MPs by Sir Thomas Legge, to a tax miscalculation; the error isn't necessarily a crime but, if it comes to light, it will always have to be repaid. In a sense, this imposition by Sir Thomas is a taste of their own medicine; a couple of years ago, the Labour MPs were perfectly happy to inflict the flat rate capital gains tax on the country - a notion with massive retrospective effects on thousands of people.

======================================================

Need to stop this ramble now but hope to be back sooner than usual.