Tactical poker pics full#

It is used to explain the health or otherwise of Britain's biggest companies. The FTSE 100 index is the bellwether of the stock market. But they soon lose patience if the statistical data continues to prove accident prone. Of course, the ONS can only work with the information customs and its other sources provide, and where it knows that information is flaky, economists would rather hear about it. Coming the month after £20bn worth of backward revisions to the same data series, yesterday's warning hardly inspired confidence. The national statistics brand is meant to be a kitemark of quality, which economic policymakers know they can trust. Quite apart from the question of how customs is being run (which is the subject of a potentially radical review by Treasury permanent secretary Gus O'Donnell), when market-sensitive data is issued with a loud caveat, it raises the question of whether they should have been released in the first place.

Tactical poker pics full#

And the mess which resulted from the whopping missing trader fraud revisions is still being sorted out, with the full impact on the GDP figures not due to be revealed until September. Some of these misdated exports have already been shifted back into the right month but the ONS admitted that it will probably have to rewrite history once again when customs has got its act together. Yesterday, the statisticians were forced to admit that a glitch in customs' new hi-tech computerised system had caused some exports to be logged under the wrong month. Last time, customs and the office for national statistics had mysteriously uncovered more than £20bn worth of imports over the past four years which had been masked by so-called 'missing trader' VAT fraud. But if they hold out in Cancun for more ambitious targets, the round will almost certainly miss its January 2005 deadline, and the longer negotiations go on, the more expectations will be have to be scaled back.įor the second successive month, yesterday's official trade figures came with a health warning. If they accept a watered down deal from the two biggest trading blocs this week, the round will be by its own standards a failure - agriculture remains the key issue for developing countries. Supporters of radical reform face a hard choice. Eviscerated by the French, the CAP reform has been a botched job, leaving Brussels little room to open its markets to developing countries or cut the export subsidies which flood developing world markets with Europe's surplus goods. Such tactics are designed to hide what is in fact a weak hand.

As long as it treats the new round like a poker game and insists on negotiating in an atmosphere of crisis, it will be the fall guy if Cancun fails. The EU has only itself to blame, however. EU trade officials complain that they are always the villains when it comes to farm subsidies, pointing out with some justification the billions Washington spends on food aid and export credits which are not covered at all by WTO disciplines.