Reading about the hike to energy bills of 54% makes me wonder if the wheels have come off all aspects of fiscal infrastructure. Systemically, it seems the Treasury has given up.

You can’t pass on a 54% rise to people who can’t afford it. It’s too much. Lots of people won’t be able to pay it and many more will take Edwina Currie’s caring advice from 30 years ago to simply knit a bobble hat. By putting this through they are not going to get the money. It’s nuts.

In the old days, actuaries would be deployed to wrestle with an issue like this and come up with some way of handling it but perhaps the government has run out of goodwill. In any complex field of economic management, you can’t throw a price rise like this at people and expect them to pay it when you know a lot of them can’t. It’s very much a last resort. This leads me to think that the Government has lost the support of the civil service.

I had a similar theory about the last year or so of Trump. Routine logistics became harder and gaffe after gaffe happened because he » Continue Reading.