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What I read in 2025. If you make it all the way to the end, there is a short selection of long-read articles as well aguntasolo.co/what-i-read-in…
tyro
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You have to email the Houthis if you want your ship to cross the Red Sea. They reply within 24hrs
“Farage is under investigation over an undeclared gift of £5m, which is a living wage even in London”
Might be useful to someone so quote tweeting
1. The original payment to the slave holders was something like £20m made up of £15m paid by a bond and £5m in government stocks. The most important point about the bond was that it did NOT have to be repaid. Govt could be paying interest on it forever or until whenever it decided to repay the £15m principal. The slave holders got their cash and by 1844 practically all of them had sold the stocks and moved on.
2. Because the U.K. govt issues a lot of gilts, they regularly have to do housecleaning exercises to tidy up the gilt book. In 1927, they did one where that bond for slave holders (whatever was left of it) was consolidated with several other bonds including ones that were used to fund wars with Napoleon. This single consolidated bond paid 4% and again - IT DID NOT NEED TO BE REPAID. You could collect the 4% coupon in theory forever until the govt decided to redeem the principal.
3. In 2015 there was another housecleaning exercise and this time, because interest rates were lower than 4% (the good old days), the govt decided to pay off those forever bonds where it was paying 4%. This simple logical financing decision to save some coins is what gave birth to this meme that “UK taxpayers were still paying for slavery until 2015”.
Assuming the whole £15m was even still outstanding, imagine saying the U.K. govt which spent almost £800bn in 2015 waited until 2015 to pay £15m, something that amounts to around 10mins of govt spending. The entire story is down to the type of bond that was issued and the fact that they did not need to be repaid. That’s it
1. The original payment to the slave holders was something like £20m made up of £15m paid by a bond and £5m in government stocks. The most important point about the bond was that it did NOT have to be repaid. Govt could be paying interest on it forever or until whenever it decided to repay the £15m principal. The slave holders got their cash and by 1844 practically all of them had sold the stocks and moved on.
2. Because the U.K. govt issues a lot of gilts, they regularly have to do housecleaning exercises to tidy up the gilt book. In 1927, they did one where that bond for slave holders (whatever was left of it) was consolidated with several other bonds including ones that were used to fund wars with Napoleon. This single consolidated bond paid 4% and again - IT DID NOT NEED TO BE REPAID. You could collect the 4% coupon in theory forever until the govt decided to redeem the principal.
3. In 2015 there was another housecleaning exercise and this time, because interest rates were lower than 4% (the good old days), the govt decided to pay off those forever bonds where it was paying 4%. This simple logical financing decision to save some coins is what gave birth to this meme that “UK taxpayers were still paying for slavery until 2015”.
Assuming the whole £15m was even still outstanding, imagine saying the U.K. govt which spent almost £800bn in 2015 waited until 2015 to pay £15m, something that amounts to around 10mins of govt spending. The entire story is down to the type of bond that was issued and the fact that they did not need to be repaid. That’s it
@DoubleEph What’s the real story?View quoted post on X
