Do they think we are stupid?

 In the UK, the Junior Doctor's strike shows no sign of ending.  They claim they are poorly paid - placards claiming it's £15 per hour. Well what is the reality? The pay scale is public information so let's do some analysis. First let's gather the facts: Foundation Doctor Year 1 (FY1) has a salary of £32,398 Foundation Doctor Year 2 (FY2) has a salary of £37,303   You can still be considered a Junior Doctor when your salary is £63,152 Their contracted hours are 40 hours per week + 8 hours overtime.  There are additional weekend allowances, night work enhancement, on-call availability allowance etc. 6 weeks holiday per year  (30 days) + 8 public holidays.  If you have to work on a public holidays you get 2 days in lieu. Where does the £15/hour claim come from? If we take a year 1 Junior doctor - someone straight from University with little experience - then their salary is £32,988.  Someone has assumed they work 52 weeks per year for 5 days pe...

 This year has not been a good year for water companies and the disgusting scale of how much sewage is pumped into our rivers has become mainstream news.  There is real anger at the water companies. Outflows are meant to be the exception but it seems for those that are monitored, they are pumping sewage into the rivers about 30% of the time.  Who knows what the ones that aren't monitored are doing.  Apparently 8mm of rain per hours  is considered a storm by water companies and is enough to trigger raw sewage overflowing.  Insurers consider 25mm to be a storm so 8mm is more like a modest soaking than a storm. Since privatisation, water bills have increased by 40% compared to inflation, investment has declined 17% and £72 billion has been paid in dividends. The water companies are now saying they will have to spend billions (that they have given to shareholders) to catch-up with the service they should be delivering.  Where are they expecting to get thes...

 As we are in an era of supply side inflation, I thought it would be interesting to ask Chat GPT what it would do? " how do you tackle supply side inflation?" Here's it's response with my commentary in italics: Supply-side inflation occurs when the costs of production for goods and services increase, leading to an upward pressure on prices. To tackle supply-side inflation, governments and central banks can consider various strategies: Structural Reforms: Implement long-term structural reforms to improve the efficiency and productivity of the economy. These reforms can include labor market reforms, deregulation, reducing trade barriers, and improving infrastructure. OK the government is trying to reduce trade barriers as a result of Brexit. It is not being done to tackle inflation. Not being done. Investment in Human Capital: Enhance education and training programs to improve the skills of the workforce. A more skilled workforce can lead to higher productivity and...

 Today the Office for National Statistics released the UK inflation data for the year to July 23. On the surface the headline news is positive - inflation is being tamed and it fell from 7.3% for the year to June 23 to 6.4% to July 23.  That's a 0.9% drop. Although it's never a good idea to do percentages of percentages but I will anyway!  It's an impressive 12.3% drop ! Sadly the Bank of England will almost definitely increase interest rates again.  6.4% is still higher than their target of 2% and the unemployment increase from yesterdays data wasn't big enough. They want to punish us naughty people that are causing inflation. They will prescribe more bad medicine. Rate hikes - here they come. The reality remains this inflation is supply side inflation not demand side inflation. The reality remains that food inflation is high and the UK imports >50% of food so we are importing inflation. The reality is the bond yield curve has inverted - a clear signal we are ent...

The ONS has published the latest labour market overview .   It looks like the Bank of England's toxic medicine of interest rate rises is slowly but surely rippling through into the economy and bringing the UK closer to recession. Here's the headlines: Job vacancies in the quarter to July 23 fell by 66,000 Unemployment rose by 0.3% to 4.2% Regular pay growth was 7.8% In otherwords unemployment is rising and the pool of available jobs is falling. The ONS mentioned the regular pay growth was due the NHS one-off bonus payments made in June 2023.  The report covers the period April, May and June.  Some other data covers other periods. This payment was a one-off payment of between £900 and £1190.  With the NHS reported to have a workforce of around 1.7 Million this equated to an overall payment of more than £1.53 Billion by tax payers. Interestingly the ONS neglected to mention that the pay growth for Apr-June 23 compared to Apr-Jun 22 included an increase in the...

 In the UK, Junior Doctors are striking over pay.  Is this justified? The NHS is a vast organisation. According to Wikipedia, it's the 5th largest in the world. Yes THE WORLD.   The organisation is on a similar scale to all McDonalds employees in the world.  It is reported to employ 1.7 Million people. Given the UK population is supposed to be  67.7Million, that's a reasonable percentage of the population is employed by the NHS. As of September 2022, there  are 75,000   junior doctors in the UK - the total  has increased 33%  from 56,000 since September 2015. Overall the NHS performance since September 2015 has deteriorated with significant increases in waiting times. So the additional 20,000 Junior doctors has not improved performance. There are 132,000 doctors so approximately 57,000 senior doctors/consultants in addition to 351,000 nurses.  This totals 483,000 clinical staff.  It's not clear what the other 1.2 Million p...

 Today the ONS published the UK growth data for the period May-June 2023.  Well the good news is the economy grew by 0.2%.  Considering May was negative (-0.1%), this is positive news.  May growth was explained away on bank holidays and the Kings coronation and apparently June's 0.5% was compensation for May's poor performance - maybe the weather also helped. Although we may view this as good news, the pessimists at Threadneedle Street are probably looking at this as bad news.  Their interest rates are not working and we need more of their evil poison. Although this may seem good news, GDP is pretty much at pre pandemic levels.  If growth had followed the same pre pandemic trajectory we would be at an index rating of about 105 compared to 100.  I'm not a great fan of GDP as a measure.  For example if everyone in the country replaces all light bulbs with LED light bulbs, GDP would fall.  We would be much more efficient, less wasteful etc yet G...