*speechless*

Guess I am pretty happy about being a web-fox.
The first ‘game’, or test, is gameable if you have a text editor open next to your browser, but I did the test without it after discovering that if you made it through to a sequence of 20 numbers (which, to be fair, I was actually remembering - typing the numbers in helped me remember them, and although I glanced at them, I think that was for confirmation rather than as a way of correcting my memory!) and had a life left, the test got stuck!

Wonder if this has anything to do with the Pope’s visit…

Meanwhile, I can’t help but wonder which government the Rabbi is thinking of - there appears nothing astonishing about this behaviour whatsoever, to me. It is par for the course, sadly.

OK, so there is a problem with the finances, yada yada, we are, I am quite sure, all a lot more doomed than the Government of media are letting on. But never mind that…
The UK Government apparently didn’t keep records of how much it had borrowed until 1993? How is that even possible?

Sir Nicholas Winterton brings knighthoods, and the House of Commons in to disrepute by insisting that the sort of people who travel in ‘economy’ class on trains are a ‘totally different type of people’ with a different outlook on life, who don’t work or study when travelling by train.
With all due respect (i.e. none whatsoever, as that is all that is due to him) the man is a class A idiot.

In a boom-bust cycle, the normal person in the street suffers from booming house prices making it impossible to get on the housing ladder during the ‘good years’, alongside, typically, rising prices. During the ‘bust’ period, the normal person on the street has the threat of redundancy, and government investing heavily causing national debt to rise, so that when you get back out of the downturn, the normal person in the street continues to suffer higher taxation or lower spending on the services they expect from government.
Even in the (illusory) stable growth we were supposed to be achieving, the greed of the wealthiest means the ‘growth’ gets out of hand, house prices rise far beyond the levels affordable by normal people, and that, in itself, puts money into the hands of those who have managed to buy more than one property.
All the while, the decisions being made on how to run the economy are being made by people with far more money than said average person. The decision makers are heavily insulated against the effects of the decisions they make. Sadly, the majority are not so fortunate.
I can’t help but feel that the housing market should be regulated in some way. I know that is against all the ‘free market’ capitalist thinking around, but if you couldn’t sell a property for more than it cost, plus improvements, plus being index linked, we would t least have a stable housing market.
On top of that, I can’t help but feel estate agents should earn their fee based on how much they can save the buyer, rather than how much extra profit they can make for the seller. Perhaps it could work both ways - a small commission on the total value, and a small commission on how much the buyer saves. Assuming estate agents have any value in the process at all, of course.

The BBC report, which takes some time and space to describe what a ‘dividend’ is, indicating the level of its expected target audience, gives the impression that there are a total of 202+179+60=441 UK companies listed. I’m pretty certain that there are over 2000, which makes this seem, well, a little odd.
The report doesn’t define what is meant by ‘defensive firms’, except by giving some examples (Drug companies, electricity suppliers, etc.) which leaves me none the wiser.
I can only assume that the market actually produces more in the way of dividends than this report suggests; at the level here, the UK’s listed companies only generate £1000 a year per person, which hardly suggests that they are important…

Yeah, hold that, you probably won’t be able to take more foreign students, because we are going to reduce the number we let in.

Why none of these experts were particularly worried when countries had massively debt-fuelled economies in order to try to dodge the boom-bust cycle, I don’t know.
Economies need to expand and contract. It is insane to think they can grow, sustainably, all the time. I don’t think you can avoid the ‘bust’, merely delay it, but while you delay it you are spending the energy needed to drag you back out the other side of the low point. In this case, a chunk of the apparent ‘wealth’ was based on dodgy accounting, high risk lending and poorly secured lending. It is like trying to stop a roller-coaster from going down the slope using a piece of knicker elastic, which turns out to have had bits of it replaced with fresh spaghetti.
Pumping money into the economy can never really work - unless it was real, actual wealth you had hoarded somewhere - because the actual value of the economy depends on its outputs. What might work is if you sneaked more money into the system without anyone knowing - then nobody would know that the money they had was suddenly really worth less.
When people are frightened for their jobs, even putting extra real wealth into the system is unlikely to stimulate demand - the demand the consumer has is for job security, or failing that, a nest egg. Even if the money were to reach the consumer, they wouldn’t really use much of it to create demand, particularly not when they are already in record levels of debt - they are more likely to save it, or pay off the debt. But by effectively giving the money to the banks at the same time as telling those same banks that they need to keep bigger reserves, the stimulus never reaches the consumer anyway.

Summary: It’s a bit of a mess. World leader 1/10, could do a lot better, should do their homework.