It seems an appropriate title, given what's going on. We'll update both the BP disaster in the gulf (and what it means), the war and politicking by people like Alan Grayson, and of course the economy, including the market action of the last two weeks with a look forward.

Join us for an entertaining hour at http://blogtalkradio.com/marketticker today at 3:30 Central!

Just one question for you this afternoon Gen if you could deal with it. How fast does this move to UK - and how do they deal with it? I'm considering going short the pound as I feel if it will move rapidly there they will start printing quickly.

Quite quickly I believe... and I don't think they will print.

Did you'all see this from Mish's site?

300,000 UK Public Sector Jobs Face Axe; No Sacred Cows Including Quangos; What the Hell are Quangos?

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.c....

Cheers to Austerity in the UK. Here is something the US needs to see twentyfold minimum: 300,000 jobs in public sector face the axe

AT least 300,000 Whitehall and other public sector workers may lose their jobs as the coalition government sets to work cutting the £156 billion budget deficit.

As George Osborne, the chancellor, prepares to unveil the first £6 billion of cuts tomorrow, the full scale of the job losses that will follow has begun to emerge.

The initial savings to be announced will target such items as civil servants’ perks, which include taxis, flights and hotel accommodation.

The package will also include a £513m cut in the budgets for quangos, with some being abolished altogether.

“The outgoing chief secretary [Liam Byrne] said it all, there is no money,” said a Treasury source. “There is no time either.”

Some estimates suggest that the number of job losses could reach 700,000. These will include tens of thousands of health service managers as well as many thousands of doctors and nurses, according to internal documents from the National Health Service.

Three out of the 10 strategic health authorities have disclosed that they will reduce their headcounts by a total of 30,132, an average of 8.7%. If these cuts were replicated nationwide, the total job losses would amount to 120,000.

A similar analysis of 75 local authorities suggests that at least 100,000 council workers across the country will lose their jobs.

Thousands of police officers and their civilian support staff will lose their posts, with the Metropolitan police alone forecasting 445 job cuts.

About 20,000 jobs will be lost at the Ministry of Defence as the department faces a demand to reduce its administrative costs by 25%. Ministry insiders say the cuts are set to hit military personnel, including some frontline soldiers.

Ministers have tried to insist that any public sector job losses would be mainly among the “penpushing” bureaucrats, but answers received under freedom of information requests suggest that a wide variety of different professions will be hit.

No Sacred Cows

The Times Online also stipulates No sacred cows as the cuts begin

Tomorrow George Osborne, the chancellor, will announce £6 billion of Whitehall efficiency savings, a taster for the draconian cuts that will come in the emergency budget on June 22 and the three-year spending review in the autumn. Only then will it start to become clear whether this government can go the full five years.

LAST week a succession of cabinet ministers trooped through the doors of the Treasury to meet David Laws, the Lib Dem chief secretary and the man in charge of overseeing the cuts to come. As they sat down in Laws’s first-floor office overlooking St James’s Park, the ministers were each given the first indication of the size of the reductions they would have to make in their budgets.

Some ministers emerged relieved from their talks with Laws, who yesterday described the choice facing the government as between “the unpalatable and the disastrous”.

Michael Gove’s schools budget is likely to be almost unscathed, although cuts will have to be made to other areas of spending under his control such as the SureStart centres for toddlers. Laws is a former Lib Dem education spokesman and is sympathetic to Gove’s goal of creating “free schools” run by parents, voluntary organisations or businesses.

Other ministers came out of their Treasury meetings crestfallen. Eric Pickles has been told that the £12 billion annual budget of his Department for Communities and Local Government will have to be cut by up to 20% in real terms over three years. For Pickles this will mean taking a lot of heat from angry local authority leaders, many of them Tories, who will have to prune services to stay within their budgets.

Also facing some tough choices will be Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary. His department’s budget is one of the smallest in Whitehall, at about £5 billion, but it is likely to take a huge hit in percentage terms.

The Sunday Times has learnt that large IT suppliers such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard have been put on notice that they might be expected to reduce the value of their contracts by 20-30%.

Across all areas, 70 big suppliers to the government will be asked to renegotiate deals to find cost reductions.

Other areas that are likely to be cut are property costs and travel and consultancy budgets. There will also be a freeze on public sector recruitment.

A particular target will be quangos, which mushroomed under Labour. Ministers have been told to scrutinise those relating to their department and more than £500m in savings are expected to be identified this year. “Ones that are functional are okay, while ones that are bloated aren’t,” said one minister.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission, headed by Trevor Phillips, and the Environment Agency are expected to be told to slim down, as will the quangos that administer the national lottery.

In the longer term, there will be a Treasury purge of civil servants’ and ministers’ perks. Officials have found the government spends £125m a year on taxis, more than £320m on hotels and more than £70m on flights. On top of this is the £580m spent on office furniture, £1 billion on advertising and a further £700m on other marketing and media. All will be pruned back.

Tree

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quango

quasi non-governmental organisation

Very appropriate.

Especially when one considers that if one covers oneself in grease and sets oneself on fire, after one realizes it was all a BIG mistake, that going off the deep end into the swimming pool won't put it out...

Tienkou & Wis... thanks.... but that is just part of the article title

Quote:

The Times Online also stipulates No sacred cows as the cuts begin

--snip--

Quote:

Michael Gove’s schools budget is likely to be almost unscathed

Some cows are so sacred, that there's never any consideration given to reducing their budgets. Try keeping budgets FLAT on education, and suddenly Little Johnny won't be able to read any more.

go long booming companies

if they do it right

What can't continue won't. Now who said that?

Mortgagedude: Gen's right. This UK government won't print. It's medicine time in the UK. We've just had a first, not very strong dose. Our government has only been in for 13 days and the last Labour government were spending like three armed men. I don't doubt the good intentions of the current government, but I suspect they are just finding out about the last gov's off balance sheet evasions and are thinking 'oh ****, it's worse than we thought'.

Maybe this government could do it in isolation but we face big problems if the Euro detonates.

Quote:

What can't continue won't. Now who said that?

I believe that's Newton's first law of motion.

Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

An irresistible force meeting an immovable object...

yeah I would like to know whether you think UK rates rise?, or is everything going to all time lows...?

A friend told me that a large volume of waste from Nuclear reactors are tools and protective wear. He used to work maintenance and while he was doing the work, he had to document every single action he did. I turned the bolt 1/4 of a turn, I placed the used wrench in the 'used equipment' pouch, I placed the pouch in a barrel, along with all the protective wear they had on. The barrel gets placed in another container, and so on. All the while people monitoring him on camera and documenting everything he does. He's told me the story about the 'waste' every time nuclear power was brought up.

In that regard, there is a tremendous amount of waste. You can bury it safely in a cave forever as long as you can keep it from eventually contaminating a water supply.

G. - On today's show you stated that the volume of fuel tanks on natural gas fueled trucks is excessive. Google/Wiki gave the result that LNG (liquified natural gas) proposed for long haul trucks has 60% the energy density of diesel fuel. The same range for LNG requires 1.66 times the volume of a diesel fueled truck. Including high efficiency insulation on the cold LNG fuel tanks, the volume (including insulation) would be approximately twice the diesel tank volume. This is not a deal breaker.

LNG has to be held at -160C (roughly)

I said it would work for a long-haul truck that was constantly on the move, and CNG is used (successfully) in city buses now.

To bring sane urban planning back to our cities, that's gonna take more like a seventy-five or a hundred years.

http://tickerforum.org/cgi-ticker/akcs-w....

EXCELLENT Blogtalk BTW. Thanks.

Quango or qango is an acronym (variously spelt out as quasi non-governmental organisation, quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation, and quasi-autonomous national government organisation) used notably in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and elsewhere to label colloquially an organisation to which government has devolved power. In the United Kingdom the official term is "non-departmental public body" or NDPB.

he he he love your laughs during the show, great show.

quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization -- uh like ACORN?

WSJ numbers out now, new highs: 16, new lows: 28

Comment about the "shut it down to fix the valve":

They probably figured that since they were in process of doing that very thing, it would be ok. Only way to replace that valve is to pull the BOP to the surface and the only way to do that is to get the concrete plugs in - which is what they were doing.

No matter whether they wanted to do it or not, they had to finish the process they were undertaking before they could.

Karl, great blog talk today as usual. Hot off the wire, you daughter might get bill down the road to pay for.... We got screwed the first time when we paid for the Cadillac benefits and pensions... Now we are going to get screwed again.

The Next Bailout: $165B for Unions
http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal-fina....

Tack on another $1,460 of debt for each household. Of course if stocks go in the gutter like I think they will we will need a lot more then that.