One hacked tweet yesterday and the DOW plunges 100 points, only to regain it all in a matter of minutes. The AP twitter account has been restored this afternoon, the offending tweet deleted, and normality returns to the markets…

It was less than fifteen minutes after the GDP news was announced before Balls’ people started calling for more borrowing and spending on the back of the news:

We now need plan to strengthen & sustain recovery – build houses using 4G funds, temp VAT cut, bank bonus tax to fund jobs for young people—
Alex Belardinelli (@abelardinelli) October 25, 2012

Two hours later they have has managed to scramble together a line:

“A one-off boost from the Olympics is welcome. But it is no substitute for a plan to secure and sustain the strong recovery that Britain desperately needs if we are to create jobs, get the deficit down and make people better off.”

Balls chooses to simply ignore the ONS stating that it only 0.2 of the 1% change was down to the Olympics.

Funny how abnormalities are only considered when the growth is positive.

Whenever Gordon Brown’s favourite former appointee to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, David Blanchflower, makes a prediction, it’s probably a safe bet to expect the exact opposite to come true. Back in 2009 the out-of-luck economist looked into his evidently faulty crystal ball and predicted that unemployment would top 5 million if the Tories came into power. As of yesterday it stands at 2.53 million and falling. David is very nearly 100% wrong – quite a wide margin of error.

He forecast that unemployment would surge past 3 million to 3.4 million in 2010. It peaked at 2.5 million in 2010.

On Tuesday Blanchflower was at it again, wagering that the new set of unemployment figures would bring bad news:

i fully expect an increase in unemployment tomorrow—
Danny Blanchflower (@D_Blanchflower) October 17, 2012

Lo and behold once again the opposite happened, with unemployment dropping by 50,000 to below 8%. Keep trying David, you might get one right eventually…

Remember when Vince Cable warned that Quantitative Easing (QE) was “Mugabenomics”? Vince flip-flopped on that even before he joined the coalition. Guido remembers when George Osborne said “Printing money is the last resort of desperate governments when all other policies have failed.” In government Osborne has overseen the printing of more money than any other Chancellor in British history. A quarter of the national debt – all this government’s overspending – has been bought by the Bank of England via QE. Guido warned against this madness in 2008…

So it is not a shock that inflation in Zimbabwe (3.63%) is now lower than inflation in the UK (3.66%, August 2011-July 2012). Gold is good.

As we predicted beforehand, the Jonah effect wiped over 100 points off the value of the Dow and saw the NASDAQ experience its worst day since June. If you watch the video closely you’ll see that he even screwed up “ringing the bell” to open Wall Street.

He’s still the accursed one-eyed son of the manse…

Two-faced Chuka Umunna is forever banging on about the need for “responsible capitalism”. Chuka might be keen to bash the bankers in public, yet the latest update to the Register of Members’ Interests shows that the Streatham MP pocketed a generous donation of £6,030 from a financial services company to sponsor his summer party in July:

Realtime Analysis and News are better known to day traders and other running dogs of casino capitalism as RANsquawk, an extremely profitable online service set-up by City whizz-kids providing tips and rumours to traders. They promise to provide “rumours that may move the market”. Responsible capitalism in action.

As impressive a service as this sounds to Guido, it does seem like the sort of thing Chuka had in mind when he was attacking the City’s “casino culture”. With Chuka he has the trick of saying one thing to one audience and something very different to another when their backs are turned…

Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, told a press conference following the meeting of the ECB Governing Council in Frankfurt this afternoon that “the euro is irreversible”. Asked by the media what he meant by that he exclaimed to much laughter “It stays, it stays, it stays. It’s pointless to bet against the euro, it’s pointless to go short on the euro.” From the beginning of the press conference to the end the € fell 200 pips against the $, so he was proved factually incorrect before he even finished speaking.

At the end of the press conference Spanish yields were back over 7%, capital flowed into German bunds as a safe haven, trading in Italian bank stocks was halted, the euro had pointedly rewarded those who were short and bet against it, costing the ECB a lot of credibility. Spain has now been told it will, like Greece, have to formally ask for a bailout on austere German terms. The can has been kicked down the road again, the end of the road however is in sight…

Keynesian economics stripped bare…

Simon Jenkins is uneasy about Quantitative Easing…

“The Bank of England quarterly bulletin is full of QE theology. Its report on a recent conference on the subject is pure angels on pinheads.”