Investing in public and private markets. Opinions are my own. DYOR.
London
Joined January 2011
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Jonathan Curry retweeted
Sir John Cowperthwaite ran Hong Kong's finances from 1961 to 1971 and treated regulation like a tax on discovery. Nobody in government can know which business will work, so he refused to pick, plan, or protect.
Whitehall sent officials to Hong Kong to push for economic statistics, and he sent them home. When Milton Friedman asked in 1963 why he collected so little data, Cowperthwaite answered: "If I let them compute those statistics, they'll want to use them for planning." Numbers give planners a reason to act, and every plan arrives as a rule that tells entrepreneurs what they may not try. Asked what poor countries should do to grow, he said they should abolish the office of national statistics.
He rebuffed tariffs, opposed corporate subsidies, and refused London's push to raise taxes. When a legislator proposed that the government back promising industries, he asked how the government could possibly know which ones those were.
The results arrived without a plan. During his decade as Financial Secretary, real wages rose 50% and the share of residents in acute poverty fell from 50% to 15%. When he took the job, the average Hong Kong resident earned about a quarter of what a Briton earned. By the early 1990s, Hong Kongers out-earned Britons. Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, planned its economy with ministries full of statisticians and fell behind a rock with no resources except a harbor.
Every regulation assumes a regulator who knows which experiments to allow. That regulator does not exist, so each gate he builds blocks the ideas nobody in the room could have predicted. Hong Kong's most valuable policy was the absence of a gatekeeper.
As far as civil servants go, this guy is the GOAT.
Jonathan Curry retweeted
On Friday 6 November, Britain’s electricity system operator spent consumers’ money like a gold digger who just got her hands on a billionaire’s Amex, paying very high prices for additional electricity imports, with interconnector auctions recording clearing prices above £2,500 /MWh
@neso_energy also accepted offers in the Balancing Mechanism at prices approaching £1,000 /MWh.
So why was NESO buying so much expensive electricity when there was apparently plenty of domestic generating capacity available?
My theory - on a low wind day it couldn't afford huge forecasting errors so it bought extra electricity on imports, turned gas generators up to SEL giving quick access to MEL if needed and turned down batteries to balance the market and preserve charge just in case
@Miatsf @mgshanks @AndrewBowie_MP @ClaireCoutinho @HarrietCross_MP @ColinMoynihanUK @drlukeevans @Ashley7Fox @cmackinlay @TiceRichard @mattwridley @DavidGHFrost @Iromg @AllisonPearson @MerrynSW @EdConwaySky @afneil @CitySamuel @mattotele @Jonathan__Leake @ofgem @energygovuk
watt-logic.com/2026/11/07/wa…
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Who are these "rogue" companies? Name them, I dare you
Because domestic gas and electricity suppliers have their profits regulated. They're not free to charge what they want
Network companies also have their revenues regulated. They also can't charge what they want
So who, specifically has gone rogue??
Or is this just another pathetic tactic to deflect from your failures
You'd do better to worry how we're meeting demand for the next 4 days during a forecast extended wind lull
(I bet you didn't even know about that until just now)
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Hopelessly incompetent
Do we have two more years of this ?
A car crash interview from Angela Eagle, “the lesser of two Eagles”.
Labour’s big announcement today is the introduction of eight new regional water councils, but the Environment Secretary can’t even explain what powers they’ll actually have.
Additionally, which areas will each one cover? Who will lead them? How will membership of these councils be selected? When will they be established? Who will they answer to? Etc, etc…
Another shambolic announcement from a Government which loves a headline, but has zero detail to back it up.
Jonathan Curry retweeted
This makes no sense on any level. They're all mad.
Nationalise Poundland? Yes. A business minister indicates that this could indeed be a possibility, as @DuncanHugo repoŕts
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Labour have given away the farm with their awful agrifood deal with the EU.
No say in the laws, a rubber stamp parliament, and a massive bill. If anything is 'hard Brexit', it's that.
My @Telegraph column tonight.
telegraph.co.uk/gift/65ac678…
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Louise Haigh, the first female, convicted fraudster to do PMQs. Another glass ceiling shattered.
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Absolutely brutal from a BYD spokesman on designing cars for European conditions.
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Salah Sultan, a senior Muslim Brotherhood figure, was recorded calling for Jews to be killed and America’s destruction.
His son, Mohamed Soltan, maxed out donations to Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign. El-Sayed has publicly defended him.
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Andy Burnham wants you to pay for what your ancestors did 500 years ago. So how much is he coughing up for his? Kemi Badenoch has a cold, hard truth for him.
Slavery reparations, but as you’ve never seen them before.
{satire}
Jonathan Curry retweeted
This kind of thing is extraordinary. An MP. We must put a compulsory basic economics/business course in place before these people are allowed to take their seats.
'I don't think employers are working people.'
@CamillaTominey grills Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Emma Reynolds MP, over whether Labour has breached its manifesto pledge in the Budget.
📺 Freeview 236, Sky 512, Virgin 604
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Here’s our Fred. Back to stand another day, in memory of our most brave.
Fred has been spat at, called a war monger and worst of all at Brent Cross, he was told by security that he wouldn’t be able to come in and stand unless he REMOVED HIS MEDALS AND UNION JACK BADGE.
Where’s the gratitude?? Where’s the respect?? Shameful
Bless you Fred❤️🇬🇧
@policylaila @Alexarmstrong @EssexPR @RossKemp
My sister went to Waitrose on Sunday in Mill Hill East and there was a veteran called Fred selling poppies. She went to buy one for him and as it was chilly outside asked to buy him a coffee to warm him up. In conversation she heard from him how he has been spat at, called a racist and a warmonger … all for selling poppies to remember our most brave and fallen heroes. It broke my heart. What has become of this country? Where is the gratitude to those that lay down their lives so we could be free? Where has pride in our country gone?
I’ve been there every day since in the hope of seeing him, but as yet, Fred hasn’t returned.
Jonathan Curry retweeted
I love the smell of a humiliating climbdown in the afternoon:
news.bristol.gov.uk/press-re…
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Africans selling other Africans into slavery for profit was a great crime against humanity.
Yet they're not ashamed of themselves - on the contrary, they're demanding "reparations" from Britain for buying slaves off them.
"You bought the slaves we sold, now pay us reparations!"
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Let’s welcome into the world the UK’s new 53% tax rate, for pensioners earning between £12,570 and £13,037:
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Outsiders sometimes assume that morning commuters in Tokyo are cold strangers who only stare at their phones and never get involved.
At 9:15 a.m. on July 22, 2013, at Minami-Urawa Station north of Tokyo, a woman in her thirties slipped and fell waist-deep into the eight-inch gap between the concrete platform and a thirty-two-ton steel train car.
She was pinned tight against the undercarriage, and the train could not move an inch without crushing her.
Modern Japanese commuter trains rest on pneumatic air-spring suspension bogies designed to tilt slightly when weight shifts.
The moment a station attendant blew his whistle and called for help, passengers inside the car immediately stepped off to remove ten tons of human weight.
Then forty strangers in business suits and summer shirts lined up shoulder to shoulder along the platform edge.
Without knowing each other's names, they pressed their bare hands high against the stainless-steel wall and pushed together on a single count.
The thirty-two-ton train car tilted backward on its springs by several inches, and attendants pulled the woman out without a single scratch.
The crowd clapped once, stepped back onto the train, and rode to work just eight minutes behind schedule.
That is what a high-trust society looks like when a stranger is in trouble.
Jonathan Curry retweeted
Winner so far, hat tip to @MJBurrows - the Tapas Budget, lots of fussy little measures that add up to nothing very satisfying
