Duncan Weldon

25 Aug 2025

Time for a new pinned post. Out now in the UK, coming January 6th in the US.

24m

Think I’ve tried four different incorrect spellings of ‘diesel’ today.

bbc.co.ukPakistan v Sri Lanka - Cricket - BBC SportFind out the in depth batting and bowling figures for Pakistan v Sri Lanka in the Men's One Day International Series on BBC Sport.

What’s happened here then? www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricke...

Tri series not looking great for England then. Suppose I’ll have to go back to vicariously supporting South Africa on the grounds they have a Durham player.

Recency bias is me getting annoyed that Claude is taking two or three minutes to do a job that would take me the better part of an hour.

A useful thing that the OBR might do but which the government probably can’t: a nice long section clarifying the costs of the Iran war on the British economy and public finances.

youtu.beIs War the Biggest Threat to the UK Economy?YouTube video by Making Money Podcast

Enjoyed doing this. youtu.be/Hh6TXmKCcCg

But, if you want to remind yourself that you are actually getting on a bit then i throughly recommend recording a video podcast with two 20-somethings.

I have ironed my shirt, as is required by the conventions of broadcasting. Oh, you’re in t-shirts.

19h

The John Peel fallacy. But about Liz Truss’s book.

19h

“I don't understand why this record isn't a hit, everyone I know has bought it." "You know everyone who has bought it."

21h

Theory: A chancellor being an economist can be actively unhelpful. There’s a tendency to worry too much about other economists think. So you end up leaving obvious political wins on the table because someone who you respect might say something mean about you at a Peterson Institute roundtable.

ft.comJohn Healey to give £20bn boost to UK’s business lender and infrastructure bankTreasury predicts extra funding will create and support 100,000 jobs as chancellor seeks to exploit flexibility in government’s fiscal rules

This is not only good policy but also a sign of how much progress Burnham & Healey have made on getting markets on side. www.ft.com/content/4111... John Healey to give £20bn boost to UK’s business lender and infrastructure bank

I don’t think you can utilise the flexibility inherent in the fiscal rules to boost investment if you don’t have a solid level of trust.

The vibes matter.

econvitals.orgEconvitalsA running read on the health of the U.S. economy: the latest data on growth, jobs, inflation, financial conditions and the federal budget, in one page of charts updated as the numbers come out.

This really is exceptionally useful. econvitals.org

I think it can be quite hard to grasp - unless you have seen it first hand - quite how much of the work of a junior economist at a central bank, etc is just gathering this sort of data and making these sorts of charts.

Anthropic numbers are pretty amazing.

Kinda fascinated by this sort of thing. Like the full all-star cast Harry Potter audible books, which I presume did well? Are we re-inventing the radio play?

inews.co.ukThe Queen of shops who accidentally helped wreck the great British high streetJames Ball: Mary Portas tried valiantly and smartly to revive our high streets, but that was the wrong approach

I’m lucky enough to have a good high street about 10/12 minutes walk away. Quick look through the last month of bank transactions for retail spending there: Holland & Barrett (once), TG Jones (three times), indie vape shop (twice), indie card & overpriced tat present shop (once).

James Ball@jamesrball.com

The British syndrome, summarised: 78% of us say our high streets are important to us. But only 28% of us actually use their local high street even once a week – and only 53% of people said they used theirs *once a month*. We won't use it, and we won't lose it.

More if you count coffee shops/Greggs/the nice bagel place. But was looking for traditional retail.

Total spending volume dwarfed by local Aldi and Sainsbury’s. Quite a useful exercise.

Very much game on at the moment in Lahore.

What a match.

Friendship with Razaullah ended.

Duncan Weldon@duncanweldon.bsky.social

Becoming a Razaullah mega-fan.

The Copilot advert they keep showing in the breaks is utterly baffling.

For a user, yes the message ‘is your coworker getting praise? Use this tool to copy his work’ might work. But for an actual business decision maker making material calls about how much AI to use and how much to spend - surely this is off putting?

Told my family I’d like to watch Pakistan England today and that it starts at 8am. They all seem to have assumed it’s a T20 game and will be done before noon. Oh well. Not my fault if they don’t grasp the difference between 20 over and 50 over cricket.

Well. Great piece of fielding from Razaullah.

Politics! A Prime Minister making an argument. Trying to persuade people of something. Again.

Matthew Holehouse@matthewholehouse.bsky.social

A possible Zeitenwende from Burnham to Ben Riley-Smith: open to freedom of movement, no to the euro or Schengen

And again. ‘Starmer with better TikTok’ is such a bad take.

Halloween trail this morning. All went a bit Blair Witch.

‘occasional annoying bleeding heart anti-colonialism slant’. Can’t please everyone I suppose.

thehumbleaddress.beehiiv.comThe national commission on electoral reform is an opportunity to consider the role of MPsA plea to ensure that form follows function

I don’t read Good Reads reviews as a rule. Because that way lies madness. But I was sent this one.

Duncan Weldon reposted

Alice Lilly

@aliceolilly.bsky.social

I've talked before about how we are overdue a proper think about the role of MPs. The proposed national commission on electoral reform is an opportunity for this. I mused on that here thehumbleaddress.beehiiv.com/p/the-nation...

Reminder: if Sooryavanshi was in the UK, he’d have just finished his first half term in Year 11.

Cricinfo@cricinfo.com

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi is set to bat at No. 3 in the second NZ-IND T20I, where India have opted to bowl. Sooryavanshi replaces the injured Ishan Kishan and Prince Yadav comes in for Mayank Yadav; for New Zealand, Jacob Duffy replaces Adam Milne srkl.in/63321BC5795

bbc.co.ukHarry Brook underlines status as world's best all-format batter in Rawalpindi run-festOnce the disappointment of defeat dissipates, Harry Brook can reflect on another starring role with the bat which underlines his status as the world's best all-format batter, says Stephan Shemilt.

The rarest of things in cricket writing: a long piece on Harry Brook which doesn’t feature the word ‘mature’. www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricke...

V good piece. Avoids the usual trap of ‘yes, he is obviously the best batsman in the world. But I still don’t like how he plays. For reasons’.

Thanks Gmail. Appreciate the heads up but that sentence change suggestion would not only be inelegant but also actually change the meaning.

Economic types with long memories: I’m trying to find a paper (or Fed policymaker speech?) which I have memories of reading in the mid-2010s and which argued that 2007-2009 should be seen as an energy price shock (price shock - recession - losses - financial crisis, being the sequence). Any ideas?

econweb.ucsd.edueconweb.ucsd.edu

Maybe this? econweb.ucsd.edu/~jhamilton/H... Not quite as I remember it though.

The awful consumer confidence figures do suggest - to look at the silver lining for a moment - that consumers will respond to an energy price shock by cutting back. That suggests more contained second round impacts on inflation and is ammo for the MPC doves.

Still a pretty big cloud though.

I’d go slightly further and say it’s debt service/tax receipts that is the really crucial measure to watch.

Toby Nangle@tobyn.bsky.social

Absent a failed auction/ proper panic, France’s debt service costs rise only slowly. Bond mkt pressure is chronic rather than acute, so competes with other chronic pressures (and likely trumped by those that become acute first).

In fact, I reckon one of the best ways to understand the British party system breakdown and realignment in the 1920s is through the lens of really high debt service costs. The political economy of taxing people more *and* paying more of that revenue to debt service is toxic.