Posts by Tim Worstal

Quite true and I can be found arguing that point in that manner at times.

But demanding consistency is a bit much isn't it?

An excellent extension of the analogy. I shall steal it forthwith.

No, I hadn't, so thanks for that. Rather well done. I very much like how he's got the rare earths off on their own line, with the intersection being Promethium (not stable and also a RE). It's a clever combination that.

Re: Future mineral reserve creation

That last, about catalytic convertors, is true. Spoken to the people who did the research. Veolia has a plant, at least one, in operation now.

To go out and collect the dust to get the platinum? Not worth it. But if you're sweeping the streets with those lorries anyway, why not?

Last I heard it wasn't economic even then. The problem being getting the concentration up from a few ppm to 1,000 ppm which is what the refineries will take. You really, really, don't want to be trying to run your own platinum group metals refinery. The big mines solve this simply by running at vast volumes to be economic. But with street dust there's not the vast volumes.

My guess is, and it is a guess, is that this is a solvable problem. My first thought would be to run the dust through a furnace so as to burn off all the organics.

Re: Repeat?

I have indeed been saying this sort of thing for some time. Thus the collection of the compleat argument into the e-book which is linked to at the bottom of the piece and my giving a talk on it on Thursday as part of the El Reg lecture series.

Certain arguments mature as you mull over them.....

Re: And then there's Rare Earths

From the final section of the new book:

Rare earths

Annual usage 110,000 (tonnes)

Reserves: 110 million

Resources “Very large”

Total resources (ie, amount in lithosphere, in tonnes) 9,725,000 billion (for just cerium, one of 17 rare earths)

Re: The byproducts thing is also true of precious metals.

Don't know to be honest. Just don't know. The process I know about very well. But whether it's included in reserve figures, shrug?

Just to show how far this goes, rhenium. Used in jet engine blades and the like, wonderful stuff. Global usage, hmm, 30, 40 tonnes a year (thirty of forty tonnes). Usual method is that some copper ores contain molybenum ore. That particular kind of Mo ore, when you roast it (to convert from the sulphine to the oxide I think, an aid to extraction) the rheium ends up as dust in the filter bags of the roasters.

So, you mine the Cu, get the Mo as a byproduct, then the Re as a byproduct of that.

Not many reserves of Re.....

Re: Future mineral reserve creation

Thulim? That's a new one on me. I knew the notes had Europium (used to be used in CRT phosphors) in them in order to make them fluoresce under a UV lamp, as you say, as a counterfeit check. But thulium I hadn't heard about....might be the story's got a little garbled along the way?

And of course you can imagine what the note designers though of themselves when they realised they could use europium to check euro notes. Hugged themselves, cheered and went off for an early lunch perhaps?

Re: Future mineral reserve creation

It's very much a standard mining technique that when you've got a new extraction method (say, you invent heap leaching to get gold out of ore) then the first thing you do is buy up all the old slag piles from the gold mines that used the previous method. Because they're almost certainly rich enough in gold still to use your new technique on.

The rubbish dumps of today as mines in the future? I can sorta see it: although not really. As I don't think we're ever going to be short enough of minerals to make it all worthwhile.

The reason for "not economic" is though that there's massive economies of scale in mining. It's cheaper to build to process hundreds of thousands of tonnes of stuff and then run that at full pelt than it is to extract a few thousand tonnes of richer material. Usually....

Re: Tim Worstal ...

All publicity is good publicity....as long as they spell the name right.

Worstall

Unlike my moniker here in the forums which was a spelling mistake of mine many Moons ago....it would be that first log in at a place where I work for a decade that suffers the typo, wouldn't it?

Re: Other metals?

Always a byproduct, as it never forms an ore (as with hafnium). Present in a lot of different minerals in small quantities. Can be processed out of the wastes of tantalum, niobium, tin, tungsten processing. Lots in the wastes of the bauxite industry. Zirconia processing.....lots of potential sources.

Re: It doesn't matter...until it does

That's pretty much what I say, isn't it? The deficit doesn't matter but the accumulated national debt might and soon/could will?

And for completeness, the technical word for such mining is "feltching" and one who mines in that manner is a "feltcher". Amazing what you can learn by reading histories about the love life of our Own Dear King, Eddie VII.

Re: This book going to be on Kindle?

Yep, be coming out on Kindle at a reasonable price. $6.99 probably, whatever that becomes in sterling. £4 or so? There will be an alert here to let you know when it's available. Around and about the week of the talk....

Re: Confession

I wouldn't...no one else has :0)

Re: But uncle Tim, I want to hear them pigs squeak!

I can't recall which bank did this (maybe Credit Suisse?) but a bloody good idea. When bonus time came around everyone's bonuses were paid in those securitised mortgage loans that had fucked up big time.

Did rather concentrate minds.....

Re: Why not nationalise all the banks?

"It's like it's ALWAYS better for private industry to run things than the public sector unless the public sector in question is somebody else's."

Well, yes, that fits quite neatly into my explanation. The French politicians couldn't give a rat's arse about the British unions, capitalists, politics, voters and so on. Because none of them have any influence over whether a French politician gets elected or not. So, a state run company from outside the polity under discussion might well be able to run a company on efficiency lines.

The end result of this is that the French should run the British trains and the Brits the French ones. Odd, but a logical end stage of the argument.....

Re: And the Perpetrators

The loons and moths thing was to refer more to the Positive Money, Anne Pettifor wing rather than anything else. Perhaps also the Austrians calling for 100% reserve banking.

Re: So many wrong ideas to make it sound we can do nothing

Well, yes, except in the S&L thing real crimes were committed. You know, stealin' 'n'stuff.

Re: Why not nationalise all the banks?

It is, in theory, possible for a public sector company to be as efficient (and even, in theory, more) as a private sector one. That isn't, generally, how it works out though.

I've always rather liked the left wing argument about why British Leyland etc failed. Because the management was crap. Well, OK, so I'm not sure I believe that but let's accept it. That means that you're saying that public sector companies end up with crap management. Which could be one reason why they don't do so well.

Another argument often heard is that public sector companies are able to take optimal, not merely profitable, decisions. An example often given was that there's public benefits, public goods, from water and sewage supply. Thus government should run them because only government would provide the larger, optimal, level of investment rather than merely the profitable one.

Which is OK as an argument. Except reality: when the water companies were privatised the investment rate went way, waaaay, up. Because under government control they'd been deliberately underinvesting in order to keep public borrowing down.

But the real argument is that public sector companies are going to be run by politics and politicians. The concerns of politics and politicians don't notably include efficiency. Making sure that my political friends get their share (whether Tories with capitalists or Labour with unions etc) comes rather higher up (err, lower down?) that Maslow's Pyramid for a politician. So, public companies are run for political reasons, not efficiency reasons.

Please do note that this entirely allows such political running of companies to be "better" if that's the way you want to describe it. Fairer, more democratic, whatever. It's just that they're most unlikely to be as efficient given that efficiency isn't the driving concern in how they're run.

There's also an entirely different line of argument. Which is that a monopoly, whether private or public, will be equally inefficient. That it's competition that drives efficiency. And there's no point at all in turning a public monopoly into a private one (and if you do you're going to have to be very careful indeed with regulation, like water, a natural monopoly for an area, or the Grid). Here the argument isn't that the private monopoly will work better, but that if you've got a public company "competing" in a market then the competition is at a disadvantage simply because they don't have that state support. Thus you want to chuck everyone into the private sector so that you do in fact have proper competition.

TL:DR version: public companies could compete but practical experience tells us they don't.

Re: Why not nationalise all the banks?

You've noted that most of the public utilities are in fact in private hands? In the UK they most certainly are.....

Re: Wrong question

About a third of new French morgages are variable rate. About 0.5% (with current rates this low, that's a lot) cheaper.

I was a bit too strict above. A free market will provide fixed rate, it'll just be more expensive than variable rate. Someone, somewhere, has to take the risk of rates changing in general and if it's the bank they'll charge more.

Re: Wrong question

Fixed rate loans have never been a feature of the British market. In the US, only exist because of Freddie and Fannie. 25 year fixed rate just isn't something an unadorned market will provide. Waaaay too much risk in it for the lender.

Re: @Tim

Trading while insolvent's an interesting one. Because the audotirs of a couple of the banks did go to the BoE.

"Excuse me, but we think that if you're not going to provide liquidity support then the bank might be insolvent. And we'd need to provide a note to the accounts stating that."

"If you add such a note to the accounts then the bank will be insolvent. So, yes, we will provide liquidity support."

No note to the accounts because not insolvent because liquidity support promised.

True story dat.

Re: Lehmans

UK Lehmann, yes, illiquid not insolvent. But US? Not so sure.....

Re: Fractional reserve

50% is way too high. 6, 7% is enough. People jsut don't turn up demanding all their cash that often.

Speculation? This is the "ring fencing" that everyone is talking about. Can't use retail deposit money to finance investment banking.

Re: Longer Term Impact

The proper answer is that it has. Without it we'd have had deflation, we haven't, it's worked. But let me come back to this as a full piece in a couple of weeks.

Re: Longer Term Impact

In the provision of liquidity two things:

1) The amounts provided aren't the sort of amounts that would impact upon future inflation. Just not economically significant at that level. It's that the central bank can, theoretically, print any amount that is important (and one eurozone problem is that the central banks cannot, only the ECB can). Further, when the liquidity crisis is over, the banks hand the cash back, reclaim their security and the central bank cancels the new money. So, no permanent increase in money supply.

2) QE is a bit different. M4 is the money supply that matters for inflation reasons. This includes all bank credit created by the banks. There's usually a decent link to M1 (base money or cash) and M2 (M1 plus central bank deposits by banks) and that connection is V, the velocity of the circulation of money. Normally reasonably static is V. But it drops horribly in a recession brought on by financial panic or crash. So, QE creates vast new amounts of M1 and or M2, but it doesn't make all that much difference to M4. Or, rather, given that V has fallen, it stops M4 shrinking and us then getting deflation. And this is why to do QE rather than anything else. Because it's reversible (at least in theory). So, as V rises to more normal levels we can draw that M1 back out of the system (by selling off the bonds bought with it) and cancel it thus preventing V's rise from setting off a massive boom in M4 and inflation.

All of that's not quite right in proper technical terms but it's a reasonable trot through the logic of it all.

An awful lot of people don't like QE but has been a remarkably successful policy. UK and US would have been more like Spain and Portugal (but not as bad as Greece) without it.

Re: And the Perpetrators

Re both of the above comments (sorry, top two)

Because being venal, stupid, lax, greedy, incompetent, misguided and plain flat out wrong simply aren't crimes.

Thankfully, or I'd be in a hell of a lot of trouble.

A great deal more sympathy with the idea that rather more should have been fired. But criminal proceedings? What was there being done that was actually criminal? By the laws as they were at that time which is the only way you can charge someone with anything?

Re: Maybe another reason?

We have the deposit insurance. Up to €100k, part of being in the EU. Similar in the US. And the banks (and thus us, the depositors) do get charged for this at about market rates. The bank levy isn't charged upon deposis that are covered by this scheme either: it's made very clear the difference.

Re: I so want Tim Worstall . .

As it happens, as to spoken accents, we're not that different. Indeterminate English BBC I suppose....there's a couple of bits of me around on iPlayer and NPR if you're really, really interested (or entirely bored of real life).

"A mining company based in Australia selling ore mined in Australia to China would normally mean that the sale took place in Australia and will be taxed as such. How does one come to the conclusion that the Chinese get to tax it?"

On exactly the same basis that Joe Hockey is arguing that something designed by Americans in America, built by Chinese in China (an iPhone for example) should have the profit taxed where it is sold in Oz.

Re: Err... Worstall missed the plot (as usual)

" In order for the share value to go up the money does not need to be repatriated."

That's what I said. If the money is to be paid as a dividend then it gets taxed. Even if it doesn't, and the stock price rises, then the stockholder still pays CGT when they sell the share.

"We might argue that they'll never bring the money back onshore, but this means that the capital value of the company increases. So when shareholders sell stock (the only way they can cash in, as dividends aren't being paid from those profits not repatriated), then they'll pay income or capital gains tax on that increase in value."

Re: Politicians don't do delayed gratification

Well, yes, quite.