I was reading a little Economist editorial in The Week about how superstitious traders are..... Lucky ties and auspicious numbers The examples are fun enough. American traders with lucky ties, Japanese

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's latest column in the Times has four horsemen galloping in together: the wars in Iran and Ukraine; the tightly interlinked markets for oil, gas and grain; an El Niño building in

I was reading in The Week that the humble minivan is making a comeback in America, and maybe this is really a story about people finally noticing they've been had. For years the minivan has been the least

I was reading in The Week about Warren Buffett finally stepping down as chair of Berkshire Hathaway, at the grand old age of 96, and the tone of the coverage was basically one long standing ovation. The

Dominic Lawson, writing in the Telegraph, thinks taming the welfare bill will be Andy Burnham's toughest challenge. According to this figures 53% of us live in households that receive more from the state

Chris Giles has some cheerful news in the FT: Britain is apparently far less useless than we thought. For fifteen years economists have scratched their heads over why UK productivity growth collapsed,

Lionel Barber, writing in the i, reckons Labour has one striking achievement it never shouts about: it has got immigration under control. Net migration is down more than 80% from its 2023 peak and could

Three pretty standard classic runs in the last week, just my routine ATM really.... All around the same Park! Saturday Park Run.... It was another beautiful day - with a black history month takeover -

This week's The Week ran a briefing asking whether the welfare bill is out of control. It's a decent roundup, but it includes a shaded box titled 'Perverse incentives', and you can pretty much guess which

At some point in the next few years you might book a couple of nights in an English hotel and notice a new line on the bill. The government has announced that mayors in England will get the power to charge

If more decisions are going to be made locally, someone needs to be watching the people making them. Back in the 1980s, Britain had around 1,600 local newspapers employing tens of thousands of people,

The government is buying another steelworks. Having already taken British Steel's Scunthorpe blast furnaces into public ownership this summer, it's now working towards acquiring Speciality Steel UK, the

Happy HPUD everyone, into October and it's usually getting cold, but not this year! I just added another 1K Hive to the pot, and this month I've added around another 6K, not quite up to my usual standards,

Andy Burnham's answer to the housing crisis is to build more council homes. Fair enough. But Tom Calver in The Sunday Times asks the question that tends to get skipped: once they're built, who should actually

Katie Prescott in The Times wants us to feel for people stuck on gardening leave. On the face of it, being paid in full for one, two or even three years to stay at home sounds like a dream, but many on

I had mostly some slow runs over the last week, had a slight niggle in the old left thigh so took it easy until today, when I felt fine, thigh fine! Last Tuesday ... A nice gentle around the town in Hereford,

Politics in the rich world, says the Economist's Schumpeter columnist, is mostly about promising to make the economy look like it did decades ago. Now Silicon Valley is at it too. Elon Musk's Tesla Diner

David Smith in The Sunday Times makes a neat point about Chancellor John Healey's first Budget. The fiscal rules he inherited from Rachel Reeves have got even tighter thanks to rising borrowing costs,

The Week's business pages recently asked whether Britain can stop the rot, as yet another batch of UK companies gets snapped up by overseas buyers. The emotional hook is Colman's mustard, a quintessentially

Peter Apps's latest argument, summarised in The Week, is that the government needs to rein in the spread of houses in multiple occupation. The gist is that investment firms are hoovering up cheap houses