My sentence of the day is from Lord Skidelsky:

The Queen’s question was wrong, because it accepted at face value the predictive claim of economics

Exactly - as I argued before, Her Majesty should order the decapitation of any economist who claims that some combination of improved technique, courage and moral stance could prevent or predict economic crises.  Forecasts are not possible in dynamic systems.  General rules - interest rates rise, consumption falls, that sort of thing - are possible, but "this structure will collapse in August" is not.  Skidelsky argues that economics is a social science, and so

One cannot imagine the Queen in, say, nine months’ time, asking a leading political scientist: “Why did no one tell me that Labour was going to win the election?” She would understand that this was not a prediction that any political scientist could make with conviction, however much time he had spent studying present and past opinion polls. 

Although I think that is an unfortunate example.   It should be pointed out that markets are no better at real prediction, though it takes some subtlety to realise why this is so despite large parts of efficient market hypothesis being true.  Richard Thaler explains: 

The EMH has two components that I call “The Price is Right” and “No Free Lunch”. The price is right principle says asset prices will, to use Mr Fama’s words “fully reflect” available information, and thus “provide accurate signals for resource allocation”. The no free lunch principle is that market prices are impossible to predict and so it is hard for any investor to beat the market after taking risk into account.

 The no free lunch hypothesis is still working.  The "price is right" bit is in deep trouble.

I too get annoyed when people somehow see a miracle in French 'productivity'.   If you stop the 3m least productive workers working, then you get good aggregate stats. This letter writer puts it well. 

Luke Johnson ranted about Britain returning to traditional virtues (which normally means "manufacture more", particularly when the article is being written by someone involved in services and finance, oddly).  A letter writer puts him right.

Sitting in Hong Kong, where employment in the service sector rose from 52 per cent to 80 per cent between 1981 and 2000 while in manufacturing it fell from 39 per cent to 10 per cent, despite which our prosperity flourished, I would ask why he seems to want the UK to compete in areas where it is at a strategic disadvantage.

 I liked Robert Chote's explanation of the monetary and fiscal dynamics of the consolidation process that will start taking place once we are recovering.