Greeks strike against pension reform plan, UK next?

Yesterday Greek workers went on strike against government plans to raise the pension age and reduce benefits as demanded by the EU/IMF package. Despite it being the start of the high season for tourism, 20% of Greek GDP, the strikers shut airports, railways and ferries. The latter are of course the core of the Island tourism business.

The work longer for a smaller pension is now appearing as a core LibCon policy. The change from RPI, which tracks the cost of living, to CPI which does not is worthy of the former great leader, GB, at his best. Note no attempt to reverse Gord's 97 tax grab from the pension funds that set the whole mess up.

As the BoE's former market mathematician I note the point all the media experts have missed that RPI is an arithmetic average and CPI a geometric average. All Greek to you? Well there is one clear mathematical fact that holds on the planet Zog as well as LibCon land, a geometric mean of a set of numbers is always less than the arithmetic mean unless all the numbers are the same.

A simple example makes it clear. The arithmetic mean of 4 and 5 is 4.5, The Geometric mean is the square root of 4 times 5 ie square root of 20 is  4.472, less than 4.5. Misleading fund management companies used to play the same game by comparing their performance to the FT30 index, a geometric mean index of 30 shares which they could easily beat rather than the FT Actuaries All Share which as an arithmetic mean was rather more difficult to beat.

It did not take LibCon to revert to NuLab's bad old dishonest ways. I look forward to a winter of discontent made even worse by this glorious son of Witney, Richard III, Act 1, Scene 1. It ends with my kingdom for a horse. There may be a message there for CleggCam users.