Here are some comments from across the Irish Sea about BP’s woes, from Paddy Power, which collects bets made with Irish bookies:
Troubled oil giant BP have today been cut from 10-1 to 4-1 to file for bankruptcy before the end of the year according to leading bookmaker Paddy Power.

The cost of the ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is growing daily and recent demands by the US government for BP to set aside billions to service potential claims could hasten its path towards potential bankruptcy.

Tony Hayward remains odds-on to step down as BP CEO before the end of the year but has eased slightly in the betting from 1-2 to 8-11 on the back of some large bets, including one of £10,000, favouring the Englishman to weather the storm.

Paddy Power are also quoting odds of 10-1 for Hayward to serve any jail time as a result of the oil spill.

Henry Kissinger won. Saturday was a great day for all first generation Americans (including me) whose daddies played and cheered for hands-free European football (soccer) rather than the USA version of the game. The US team at the World’s Cup tied in its opening game against England. We play Slovenia next, on Friday.

Kissinger in the 1980s advocated that our country to prepare to compete in soccer, a game I suspect the Secretary of State had learned during his boyhood in Fuerth, Germany, as my father had learned it in Bad Hersfeld. Thanks to his sharp eyes and quick reaction, my father was a goalie, and more successful playing against the Greek team in Inwood than the poor English goalie who fumbled a let the USA score. (For some reason England, which is not a country, has a team along with Scotland and Wales; other teams represent countries.)

The soccer victory is another dreadful comeuppance for the Brits, along with the mess caused by former British Petroleum, now BP, in the Gulf of Mexico. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, deplores “anti-British rhetoric” by Americans over the oil disaster spewing out as much as 40,000 barrels per day onto our fragile coastline. If the ultra-jingo Brits were confronted by a similar horror perpetrated by an outfit called American Petroleum off their shores, I suspect the rhetoric would be much nastier.

There is however a serious mid-Atlantic split in our alignment with Britain over budget deficits. The new British Prime Minister, David Cameron (like Boris Johnson, a Conservative and Old Etonian) is calling for austerity and budget cuts to reduce the deficit. Meanwhile, US policy calls for delaying counter-cyclical budget balancing moves because the recovery is still fragile. This is not the right time to imperil economic growth by reducing deficit spending, our USA economists are saying (of course they are quoting a British theorist, John Maynard Keynes.)

But the White House-Treasury line is being opposed by our own native-grown Congressioanl Republican pre-Keynsians who want to cut spending and stimulus measures now. The new austerity advocates here are ignoring the fact that unemployment is still excessive. They are preaching here as in Britain in favor of a virtuous cycle, whereby cutting spending and taxes revives confidence. I have to confess that I do not see how this can happen.

Injecting money into the economy, cutting interest rates, buying government debt stopped the 2007-9 economic collapse from turning into a repeat of 1929. This was the policy not just of the Democrats, not just of Labour in Britain, but of both parties.

Tax-cutting has become a knee-jerk reaction to every problem in the eUS conomy for some. But in the present situation, cutting taxes also means cutting benefits for people and programs funded by Washington (even if administered by states). This salve-the-rich Old Etonian rhetoric ignores real suffering, real need, among some less privileged lower-class Americans who are not paying taxes because they are out of work.

The one thing we should not bring over from Britain is its devisive class divisions.

 

More for paid subscribers from Singapore, Britain, Brazil, Greece, Canada, Panama, Israel, China follows.