Tag: FInancial

  • China Isn’t Dumping US Debt — It’s Quietly Rewiring the System

    There’s a narrative doing the rounds that China is “dumping” US Treasuries and preparing for some kind of financial war. It’s dramatic. It gets clicks. It’s also mostly wrong. But underneath it, there is something real happening — and it matters. China’s holdings of US Treasuries have fallen from around $1.3 trillion in 2013 to…

  • Margaret Thatcher and the Comfort of Relief

    Part I: – What Changed – and Why It Felt Right Britain did not arrive at the end of the 1970s on the brink of collapse. It arrived tired, frustrated, and increasingly doubtful of itself. Inflation had become part of everyday life, eroding wages in ways that were visible week by week rather than year…

  • The next 20–50 years: what the post-American-assumption world probably looks like

    If you zoom out far enough, the argument about whether this is “just Trump” stops being the central question. The deeper issue is that the post-1945 settlement depended on one condition: a US political class willing to pay to run the system (security, sea lanes, alliances, monetary architecture) because it judged the returns worth it.…

  • NATO, Burden-Sharing, and the End of a Post-War Security Bargain

    Debate over NATO burden-sharing has intensified as the United States demands greater defence contributions from its allies. While contemporary data clearly show that the US contributes a disproportionate share of NATO’s military capability, this imbalance cannot be understood in isolation from the post-Second World War international order deliberately constructed by the United States itself. This…

  • Why Britain Always Spends the Future

    North Sea oil was not a one-off mistake. It was a rehearsal. Once a country learns that windfalls can be consumed without obvious immediate penalty, the behaviour repeats. Britain’s modern history is a sequence of moments where capital was treated as income, and the future quietly paid the bill. This pattern predates oil and continues…

  • The Long Clock and the Short Clock: Why Power Is Quietly Shifting

    There is a divide shaping the modern world that most voters sense but rarely see explained clearly. It is not left versus right, democracy versus dictatorship, or even East versus West. It is far more basic than that. Some political systems are allowed to think in decades. Others are trapped thinking in election cycles. Once…

  • The £5 Trillion Decision Britain Chose Not to Make

    In the late 1960s, two countries discovered oil in the North Sea.One of them used it to build permanent national wealth.The other used it to pay the bills. That single difference explains a great deal about where Britain is today. Norway discovered the Ekofisk field in 1969. Britain followed shortly after. Both were mature democracies.…

  • Britain: A Multi-Trillion-Pound Business Run by Amateurs

    How a once-serious nation became a masterclass in short-termism and mismanagement Introduction — Systemic, Cross-Party Failure The UK’s political crisis isn’t ideological — it’s operational. Every major party has taken turns running the country, and every one of them has left the same underlying problems untouched. The system isn’t failing because the “wrong team” won;…

  • The UK Ltd Accounts: Why Politics Barely Matters in the Balance Sheet

    Imagine if the UK were a private company. Each March it would publish its annual accounts, just like Tesco or BP. Analysts would pore over the numbers, investors (you and me, the taxpayers) would worry about the bottom line, and the board (the government of the day) would try to spin the story of “sustainable…