UK police said this morning they searched five homes in northern England. They described the search as forming a “significant” part of the investigation into last week’s London bombings. I think it’s useless speculating at this stage what this might mean. I also think it is important that the police are seen to be [...]

1. Have the main headline about your electoral program be how much you’re going to raise taxes. Particularly VAT, which practically everybody pays on practically everything.
2. Face a knock-down drag-out fight with your prospective coalition partner over #1.
3. Have the two parties that make up your Union disagree about the basic approach to health care [...]

This is really a clarificatory post. The bomb which exploded outside the Italian cultural institute in Barcelona this morning does *not* appear to have any relation with international terrorism. Radio reports suggest it is the work of a group of ‘anti-system’ anarchists protesting about arrests of some of their co-thinkers in Italy. Fortunately I don’t [...]

I don’t know if we have a lot of crossover readers from Tapped, but in the context of otherwise mostly reasonable remarks in two posts about the London bombings, they missed something important.

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There is a curious combination of expectations right now. The euro is rising, principally because of preoccupations about the US trade deficit and the associated sustainability issues, but also because there seem to be signs of a slightly better collective performance later in the year. This assessment may well be accurate. So what this means [...]

The euro is trading this morning at around $1.2150. The big issue seems to be the US trade deficit, which is currently outweighing all other considerations. Still what goes down can come up, and what goes up……
The dollar fell to the lowest in two weeks against the euro, the biggest move of any currency, on [...]

Foul play is apparently not suspected:

The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, has fired another French broadside at London’s successful 2012 Olympic campaign by accusing the prime minister Tony Blair and the head of the bid Sebastian Coe of breaking International Olympic Committee rules by criticising their rivals.
Well, well, well….

Well French Central Bank Governor Christian Noyer is back in the news again. Today the FT have an interview with him, and some of his points make interesting reading.

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Now this information needs to be treated with extreme caution, since the source in my experience is not of the best, but the Spanish newspaper El Mundo is claiming that the Spanish national intelligence centre (CNI) identified a website posting on 29th May from the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades which may be seen with [...]

Very hard to interpret the information we are receiving right now. Much of it may well be aimed at the terrorists themselves so it is also perhaps better not to dig too deeply.
There are, however, a number of rival (but possibly) compatible theories. One of these, and it is the one I am following most [...]