Martin Meenagh blog

The new JFK documents are not going to show some great clear documented conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy. They will confirm, for those who look, what we already know officially. Lee Oswald was extensively tracked and sponsored, whether he knew it or not, by sundry intelligence and arms-length schemes before and during, 1963. Mexico City and Montreal were the centres of CIA-KGB activity in North America. Circumstantially the assassination was a conspiracy gone wrong as well as, separately, an example of one or two gone 'right' accompanied by at least five different, panicked, cover-ups. These cover-ups, and the events which followed from Kennedy's death, as well as the assassination, mark the beginning of American decline. The people involved are fascinating at every level, from Oswald, Ruby, and their crowd, to Kennedy, Dulles, LeMay, Kostikov, the lot. One day, the best book which could be written about the US twentieth century will centre on the afterm...

  Income inequality arises when different consumers have different incomes, and different people have different talents. It could also arise because of the source of income or the value of the talents. For instance, employees might have different incomes from each other because of different marginal labour products, different factor returns to their labour, or different elasticities of labour. People might have different skills for which there is a greater or lesser need and employers, or the purchasers of labour might have different demands. Equally, entrepreneurs often take greater risks than others, and thereby expect and receive greater rewards than those who do not take risks. There might be different factor returns to capital or land, which result in various levels of profit, dividend, or rent, for those who do not live by the return to their labour value. A functional market would bring all these diverse groups together as suppliers and consumers and would match their c...

  Economic problems are not easily attributable to any one source in history. The wealth of a country represents the hard work and productivity of generations, but also the financial technologies, resources, and natural advantages or disadvantages of a territory. Sometimes, things go wrong, either because of cyclical, monetary, fiscal, or market-based triggers. It is a fallacy to think of such things as planned, linked, or controlled in any real sense.    Nevertheless, planned events do matter. In 2022, the UK was facing the escalation of a stagflationary environment. This came after over a decade in a local and global monetary expansion which had caused a great deal of speculative and bubble behaviour across western economies. Running alongside the monetary expansion, caused by quantitative easing (which had saved the west from collapse just as the financialisation of assets after 1975, and the invention of derivatives in the 1990s, had done) was a post-covid supply ...

   It has been just over a month since Mary Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Truss became the last prime minister of Her Late Majesty’s reign, and the first of King Charles’. What have we learned?   Constitutional Matters From a constitutional point of view, the famous ‘unwritten conventions’ of the British state have been put under severe strain. Truss is the fourth Prime Minister to lead a Conservative administration since 2015, and the second not to have won her majority in a general election. Such situations are not meant to overly trouble the state, since the conventional wisdom is that the Conservative Party won the 2019 election, not Boris Johnson, and so the mandate to govern from the electorate belongs to the party, not a person. This is not a novel idea, and not in itself problematic. Of the past twenty Prime Ministers, Truss, Johnson, May, Brown, Major, Callaghan, Home, Macmillan, Eden, Churchill, Chamberlain, Baldwin, and Bonar Law all became Prime Minister in such a...

 This post is available here.  https://ukeconomicsonline.blogspot.com/2022/09/domestic-demand-external-pressures-and.html Domestic Demand refers to the accumulated (that is, aggregate) demand within all the markets of an economy. As such, it can be handily summed up in a formula, C+I+G+X-M, where C is consumption, I is investment, G is net government spending, and X-M is net exports. This is usually referred to as ‘AD.’ Consumption is the largest part of AD. All the consumption decisions within the economy, including all non-investment purchases by households, individuals, and firms, add up to around two thirds of AD. In addition, the Keynesian economic theory asserts that there is a link between consumption and investment, which can drive AD upwards, as firms invest more when they see that consumers are purchasing more goods and services. Investment is a sustained addition to long-run aggregate supply, or capital for short. AD can be plotted against LRAS on a two-dimens...

It is a truism to state that Irish nationalism emerged in opposition both to the behaviour of British authorities and to an imagined and real distinction within the United Kingdom as a separate nation. I write ‘imagined’ because nations are imagined communities of interest, but also because the histories of Ireland and Britain, before, during, and after the Union of 1800 are deeply entwined. They are not the history of the same entity, but large numbers of Irish people, including most nationalists at most times, were royalists, spoke English, worshipped as Protestants, and reacted differently to each other as a collective compared to individuals. As is evident even in the twenty first century in the surnames of British trades unionists, the Irish and British working classes outside of Dublin were and are intimately connected. The lyrics of the anthem of the Labour Party, which for a long time was a party of working people rather than the professional classes, was written by an Iris...