31, Physicist, Engineer, amateur economist. Constantly in a superposition of disappointment and pride with the world.
Hampshire, UK
Joined October 2011
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Jamie Smith retweeted
Higher interest rates won’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz or bring down energy prices.
Instead, today’s rise to 4% risks squeezing households already facing higher heating, fuel and mortgage costs.
With energy bills forecast to rise by at least £400 a year in January, the government must go further and introduce a temporary £2,000 cap on typical household energy bills to tackle inflation at source.
Read our body of research 👇️
Jamie Smith retweeted
The Bank of England has just raised interest rates to 4%. But higher rates won’t make oil any cheaper, and households are paying the price for a shock we can’t control. My piece for @LBC 🧵1/9
lbc.co.uk/article/higher-int…
Jamie Smith retweeted
The Bank of England has raised interest rates to 4%, supposedly to tackle inflation.
There is just one problem with this decision. The Bank knows that much of the inflation we are suffering is being driven by rising oil and energy prices, largely resulting from conflict in the Middle East.
It also knows that raising interest rates cannot reduce those prices.
So why is it doing this?
The answer is that the Bank believes it must suppress demand elsewhere in the economy to compensate for rising energy costs.
In other words, it is deliberately making mortgages more expensive, increasing business borrowing costs, discouraging investment and reducing household spending power.
And all this when people are already struggling with higher energy bills. That is problem number one.
There is, however, another problem. Higher interest rates increase costs for businesses, which can then feed through into higher prices. They can, in that case, add to inflation rather than reduce it.
The Bank is imposing economic pain to address a problem its chosen policy cannot directly solve.
That is not sound economic management. It is the consequence of an economic dogma that refuses to recognise the difference between inflation caused by excessive demand and inflation caused by supply shocks.
When will we learn?
Jamie Smith retweeted
Our challenge of the Palestine Action ban at the Supreme Court will begin shortly - at 10.30AM.
We are arguing that the ban is disproportionate to free speech and the right to protest, so it must be quashed.
Live link: supremecourt.uk/cases/uksc-2…
I will also be live posting below.
Jamie Smith retweeted
OPEN LETTER: Sally Rooney is a writer, not a terrorist. Her books must be available to the public. Their withdrawal from sale, on the basis of ill-conceived and draconian anti terror legislation, is an affront to basic principles of free speech and expression so long taken for granted in this country. We categorically reject censorship - whether direct or indirect - and urge the government to change course, amending the legislation which has led us to this point of repressive absurdity.
Jamie Smith retweeted
The 'natural' rate of interest -- a costly fallacy larspsyll.wordpress.com/2026… via @LarsSyll
Jamie Smith retweeted
One can agree or disagree that Zionism is racism. I think the state of Israel is built, from the start, on ethnic cleansing & ideas of racial superiority.
Regardless, it’s not antisemitic to maintain such a view. So, so tired of these people.
Antisemitism is a cancer in our politics.
We fought hard to root it out of our party.
We will not stand by and watch it infect public life again.
theguardian.com/politics/202…
Jamie Smith retweeted
Today's economics Nobel to Michael Woodford and Robert Hall rewards the intellectual foundations of modern central banking. The problem is that several of those foundations look increasingly shaky.
A thread 🧵 1/15
theguardian.com/world/2026/o…
Jamie Smith retweeted
(1/5) This week @TheGreenParty UK adopted a fiscal framework guided by real resources; not arbitrary debt targets. MMTUK welcomes this exciting new approach.
#MMT #UKEconomics #UKGreenParty #UKPolitics
Jamie Smith retweeted
Lambeth Green Party's statement on the "Zionism is Racism" motion.
ALT Following the decision of Green Party members at our party conference to pass the ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion, we would like to address any potential concerns residents may have. We want to be absolutely clear. This Green Party motion concerns Zionism as a political ideology. The motion’s opposition to Zionism is consistent with the party’s commitment to equal rights, regardless of ethnicity, religious belief, or gender. No religious or ethnic group should have privilege or special rights over all others, or the ability to dispossess and subjugate people with different religious, racial or cultural identities.
ALT The motion has absolutely no opposition to Jewish people’s deeply felt need for security and safety, but to Zionism as a political ideology that claims the superior right of the Jewish people to historic Palestine over Palestinians. Anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism. Many Jewish people do not identify as Zionists, and many Zionists are not Jewish. Lambeth Green Party rejects the assumption that somebody's religious, racial, or cultural identity tells us what they believe politically.
ALT Nobody is going to have assumptions made about their politics because of the synagogue they attend, their family, their cultural life or their identity. This is about political ideas, not people's religion or ethnicity. Many Jewish members of the Green Party have campaigned for Palestinian liberation and against Zionism, including in support of this motion. Their existence is an important reminder of why Judaism and Zionism must not be treated as interchangeable.
ALT We recognise that some people may disagree with the Green Party's position, including some within the party, and they have every right to do so. What we hope this statement makes clear is that this policy is rooted in our commitment to equality and human rights for all. Palestinian freedom and Jewish safety are not in opposition, and Lambeth Green Party sincerely believes in both.
Jamie Smith retweeted
I explain here why I voted for the “Zionism is racism” motion at the Green Party conference. I now find myself, despite being Jewish, labelled “antisemitic” and “extremist” or sometimes worse. Obviously, I do not accept these labels
Here is my thinking
1. The dominant Israeli and Western narrative is that Zionism means (a) the right for Jews to have a homeland in their biblical land and (b) the right to have a place of safety after persecution culminating in the horror of the Holocaust
2. This, on its face, is very reasonable, right & proper. This is the core of the UK political & media response to the Greens motion
3. Sadly, the early Zionist slogan that Palestine would be “a land without people, for a people without a land” was not true - the land DID have people, Palestinians
4. The great Palestinian-American intellectual, Edward Said, wrote a 1979 essay called “Zionism from the viewpoint of its victims”
5. That viewpoint is conspicuously absent from much discussion in the West
6. Zionism has meant decades of ethnic cleansing, oppression, apartheid & killing of millions of Palestinians BECAUSE they are Palestinians
7. This is why Zionism is racism
8. One of my (many) Jewish heroes is Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. He did not go to live in Israel. He was an anti-Zionist. He said, “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors”
Jamie Smith retweeted
Zack Polanski tells Green Party conference: "We need to stop governments using the blunt tool of interest rates to control inflation."
He adds: "I meet mortgage holders who are constantly worried about renewing. They tell me they crave certainty about the future."
Jamie Smith retweeted
Hi @jreynoldsMP, I’m an economist who's come round to rent controls! Here’s why 🧵:
Markets only work well if:
-buyers & sellers have roughly equal power
-producers respond to price signals & expand supply in response to scarcity
-buyers can walk away if prices get too high
.@AyoCaesar: "The one thing the govt could do to improve the lives of young people is introduce some rent controls"
@jreynoldsMP: "No economist supports rent controls"
There you have it. Are you a young person trapped paying exorbitant rent? The Labour govt says f**k you.
Jamie Smith retweeted
Ed Miliband describes the suffering in Gaza as a “stain on the world’s conscience”. He’s right.
Now, he must urge Burnham to de-proscribe Palestine Action who’ve taken direct action - NOT terrorism - against the Genocide.
Jamie Smith retweeted
This paper finds that 90% of the observed rise in the 10-year US Treasury since August 2020 has occurred in the three-day window around US payroll reports or speeches by top Fed officials (the chair, vice chair, or Waller), which accounts for just 24% of trading days
The paper finds those days are responsible for 81% of the rise in markets' expected average short-term rate over the next 10 years, which means this isn't about investors getting nervous about holding long-term debt and is instead about markets revising their view of short-term rates.
Anatomy of a rise: Monetary policy and the post-Covid surge in long-term interest rates
Paul Beaudry @ubcVSE @UBC, Paolo Cavallino @BIS_org, Tim Willems @timwillems85 @bankofengland
ow.ly/hVw350ZPyBH
Jamie Smith retweeted
Raising interest rates will not reduce inflation. So why does it seem impossible to challenge this long-established response to rising prices?
Legitimate concerns exist about central banks' current response. Thread. 1/8
Jamie Smith retweeted
Interest rates will no longer be used as the main means of controlling inflation under a Green government. That’s just one of the eye-catching proposals in a planned overhaul of the party’s economic policy, to be voted on by members at their conference in October and seen by the New Statesman.
The motion, which gives the most thorough outline yet of how a Green government would manage the British economy, embraces a range of novel ideas and would mark a seismic break with the fiscal and monetary policy approach pursued by chancellors under Conservative and Labour governments of recent years.
The drafters describe it as “a realistic and effective proposal for how we will fund the economic system change required in the UK, without being forced against our democratic mandate by the holders of capital”. It is a key part of the Green Party’s efforts to develop a more robust left-wing programme as it attempts to “replace Labour”.
newstatesman.com/politics/uk…
Jamie Smith retweeted
🚨EXCL - here is the most comprehensive picture yet of the Green Party’s radical new economic policy under Zack Polanski
Motion C05, titled “Fiscal Referees: A New Economic Framework for People and Planet” and seen by the New Statesman, proposes to overhaul the party’s approach to the economy for the first time in years and is supported by the party leadership
It will be voted on at Green conference next month and is expected to pass. There are hopes it will draw a clear dividing line with Andy Burnham's Labour
C05 includes a range of proposals that would mark a sharp break with the fiscal and monetary policy of Labour and Conservative governments:
Interest rates dropped as the main means of controlling inflation - replaced by price controls, buffer stocks, “strategic taxation”, credit regulation and public investment
GDP junked as a measure of economic policy success because it overrates “environmentally destructive, socially harmful or economically wasteful” parts of the economy
Gov’t “progressively restricting resource use in sectors that generate pollution, ecological degradation or socially harmful outcomes.” E.g. banning banks from creating credit for fossil fuel extraction/potential human rights abuses abroad
Enshrines a proposal already floated by Zack Polanski to throw out fiscal rules and replace them with fiscal referees - OBR to be replaced by “Office of Fiscal Transparency”
And the creation of a Fiscal Policy Committee to mirror the Bank’s MPC - would oversee government spending and work toward the party's three main economic goals: full employment, “a social foundation” and keeping the economy “within planetary boundaries”
Jamie Smith retweeted
"On interest rates, Warsh dispelled a lot of nonsense with splendid candor: “We determine the path of short-term interest rates.” A brass plaque with those words should be sent to all the Washington think tanks and lobby groups that exist to prattle on about the federal budget deficit." 1/
