Matt Buck’s Hack Cartoons Diary

Dodgy tenner cartoon featuring Alastair Darling drawn for Channel 4 News © Matt Buck Hack cartoons

More rumblings from some of the membership of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England – as reported by CityWire. The MPC is the committee which decides how well the national economy is doing and which recently approved the policy of Quantitative Easing (video explainer). This process invented £225Bn of new UK money (or credit) which was then used to buy government debt, much of which was undertaken to support the insolvent banks and financial institutions including HBOS and RBS.

QE in the UK started on March 5th 2009 and ended during February of 2010.

The following chart is a screenshot of the BBC twelve-month tracker for the value of the UK’s currency –  pound sterling – measured against the US dollar and which covers these two dates. I have added them to the chart because I think there is an interesting connection of time and dates. Can you see a coincidence anywhere?

If you would like to learn about the invention of paper money or credit) with more than a few excellent jokes do watch this fine animated cartoon.

Updated: 9pm 9th March 2010. The BBC’s Stephanie Flanders has a piece of analysis on the relative position of the UK after the disappointing balance of trade figures for Jan 2010. The ‘recovery’ seems to have stalled.

International Women’s Day – since 1911.

Please roll your cursor over the image.

Payment of taxation on your earnings is how you get a vote in the way  the country is run. People who choose not to pay tax in the UK through use of the non-domicile loophole but who still seek influence on the electoral process need to be viewed with extreme caution.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair reminded us that political influence is sold for economic reasons with the £1m donation from Bernie Ecclestone in return for delaying a ban on tobacco advertising in Formula One. (The timing of this donation is interesting in relation to the current election campaign. Ecclesone’s gift was given several months before the 1997 election in expectation of services to be rendered after it.)

Clarity and transparency of donations to politicians need to apply to the funding of all UK political parties during elections – and in between them. All corporate donations are listed at the Electoral Commission and available to public scrutiny. This includes gifts in kind as well as money.

On the road for a few days but here are the KPM Allstars to entertain you with Alan Hawkshaw’s original theme for Dave Allen at Large. Genius from all concerned.

An eventful week in the wacky world of the United Kingdom, accusations of bullying, the entrance of the forces of hell, Conservative party jitters and an immediately impending election campaign for those who can still feel partisan about it all.

But, in the background, the big international game of currency solvency chicken goes on. Who will be the next sovereign nation to default on its debts. Any bets? Above, the US dollar, the pound sterling and the Euro discuss matters – after a fashion.

Reading: Laurence Copeland writing for Reuters

Reading: Definitions of a stock market crash (caution: contains theories about group psychology).

Reading: CityWire on what to do with the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The UK Digital Economy Bill is in progress through parliament. If you use technology in your life this will have a profound effect upon you and how you are able to use digital communication.

This matters because the bill sets down the rules by which the country will grow new industries to help escape the recession caused by the financial houses and the government’s efforts to bail them out.

There are many controversial elements but one of the headlines is the three strikes and your are out clause which allows disconnection (or lately, temporary disconnection) of service for ‘illegal’ downloading of content from the web.

Content – words, pictures, videos and music – is enormously valuable stuff and has made very many large companies extremely rich through licensing its use. However, the digital distribution networks of the web make it extremely difficult for the traditional models of content ‘ownership’ (supported by the laws of copyright) to work.

This is why I have used speechmarks around the word illegal above because the law is not clear on what constitutes illegal download at present. The Digital Economy Bill is supposed to resolve this – among other things.

The other really big issue in the background is control of  access to all this digital content. The answer to this lies in the physical lines which provide our broadband services. Britain has long lagged behind competitor nations in providing a truly national answer for a broadband infrastructure.

At present, the government is committed to something called the Universal Service Commitment which guarantees a certain level of service to everyone in the country by 2012. They plan to raise the money for expanding this to rural areas of the country which currently have poor access through raising a new tax on existing telephone landlines – the so-called Broadband tax.

At present most of the national network is still controlled by BT‘s quasi-monopoly. There are many other companies who would like a bigger slice of this profitable pie and at present BT holds the ring as a kind of agency. It will sell capacity to its competitors but for a hefty fee.

The Open Rights Group is a key lobby group for people interested in this area. You can also follow the real-time conversation about the particular issues of the bill at #debill.

A nation prepares for the official campaign.

The prospect of the 2010 UK general election makes me want to look in the other direction.