Fraser Nelson

Sending an ex-accountant to run the International Development department was always a bit of a risk, given that its remit - to spend as much as it can - inverts most notions of cost control. Today, the Daily Mail quotes friends of Justine Greening saying that she’ll be taking a long, hard look at just why we send a billion quid in aid to India when it can afford its own space programme, nuclear programme and overseas aid budget. She wants to do more with less, we're told, just like her colleagues across Cabinet. And this will just be the start. If Greening applies dispassionate logical analysis to DfID she would likely conclude that its budget needs frozen. No10 have said this won't happen, but the deficit reduction plan is now so off course that it may have to rethink.

Given that Barack Obama is in a fair bit of trouble, you’d think he’d have given a better speech to last night’s Democratic National Convention. Instead, he just trotted out his greatest hits. “Forward, not back,” etc. Like Mitt Romney last week, he gave a workmanlike speech and like Romney was outshone by his wife. He didn’t mention Obamacare, which is odd given that this is the signature achievement of his presidency. In fact, he hardly mentioned any achievements. He avoided the concrete and focused on the abstract which, if you’re an Obama believer, would delight you. If you’re an Obama sceptic, this would confirm why you’re unsure about him. His strategy seems to have been to reawaken his base, rather than win sceptics over.

The cover story of the new Spectator is one of the most startling we have run for a while. Last year, Liza Mundy wrote a book called The Richer Sex showing how women would become the biggest earners in most American households within a generation. She has now studied the British data and found that the trend here is even more advanced. It’s not about equality. Women born after 1985 have not just ‘caught up’ with men, but are overtaking them. But while we Brits tend to joke about this, and talk about being ‘pursewhipped,’ the Americans are taking it seriously and understanding how it is changing society forever. This means that my two sons can expect to grow up in a Britain very unlike the one I grew up in.

The 2013 Matt Ridley Prize is now open. Click here for more details. When Matt Ridley offered £8,500 for the best prize essay for environmental heresy, we at The Spectator expected lots of entries. But what took us by surprise was the quality of the submissions. The winner is Pippa Cuckson, whose piece on hydropower is the cover story of this week’s magazine. The judges had a pretty tough task. There were quite a few brilliant demolitions of environmentalism in general: as Stephen Hawking said at the Paralympic Games opening ceremony, the enemy of knowledge isn't ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. It could sum up the problem with rational discussion of global warming and related topics.

The Olympics and Paralympics have been a superb spectacle this summer, but will they help the economy? No one in the Treasury thinks so – if anything, they fear the games will hurt the figures and pretty soon we’ll be hearing about the ‘Olympic Effect’ damaging Q3 growth figures. George Osborne is already being mocked for his habit of blaming downturns on snow, holidays etc so I suspect the Chancellor will not mention it. But when first class returns from London to New York were half the price they normally are, you have the feeling not much business is being done. Today, the first economic indicator has come suggesting an Olympic effect. Each month, the European Commission takes an Economic Sentiment Index.

Remember when we used to laugh at Germany’s economy? Gordon Brown loved to contrast its sclerotic labour market with booming Britain. That was in the boom years. As Warren Buffet said, when the tide goes out you can see who is swimming naked – and today Britain looks as naked as a prince on a billiard table while Germany celebrates unemployment at near-record lows. We know where we went wrong, but it’s time for us to learn where Germany went right.  It's main insight was that the problem is a supply of willing workers, not a supply of jobs. There's no point borrowing cash to create vacancies if you can't find Germans to fill them.The so-called Hartz reforms were aimed at reforming the labour market, and improving the incentive to take jobs.

It’s official: Quantitative Easing has marked the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich of any government policy in recent documented history. The Bank of England released an analysis today, which was rejected as being an underestimate by the former government pensions adviser Ros Altman. But it was shocking enough, and the strongest point was made by the brilliant Ed Conway, economics editor of Sky News, who put it into a graph who would benefit from a QE-inspired boom in asset prices described by the Bank of England  today. "10th" means the richest tenth of the population, and so on. This is our new graph system: hover your mouse over each line, and the value should come up.

Has anyone seen George Osborne’s £3 billion? The Chancellor seems to have lost it. His government had expected to net £2.5 billion more than it spent last month, as July is normally a good month for tax receipts. Instead the figure has come in at a £600 million deficit. This is a major shock to the City, and analysts are spending today reworking their forecasts. Sure, we know the economy has flatlined. But we didn’t know that the impact on the tax haul would be so bad. As you’d expect, Labour has gone on the attack. But the Ed Balls line (being voiced by Rachel Reeves today) sounds less convincing than ever. They say that Osborne is cutting too far, too fast, and that he should more slowly and, ergo, borrow more.

The cover story of last week’s Spectator was about the political impact of rising crop prices: John R. Bradley, who alone predicted the Egyptian revolution, explained how the same phenomenon is happening again. His piece speaks best for itself but today HSBC has released some research making the same point. I thought Coffee Housers may be interested. The picture above shows how much of the US is hit by drought now, and given that it’s the number one exporter this has hit world prices. The price of wheat, corn and soyabean has rocketed by 30 per cent, 25 per cent and 42 per cent, respectively since the start of the year. As Bradley argued, today’s crop prices will inflate tomorrow’s meat prices.

The problem with granting independence to schools is that you never know what they’ll do with it. Quite a few of them want to use pre-existing freedoms to sell their school sports ground which happened all the time under Labour and was (like forest disposals) not much remarked upon. But now, post-Olympics, the issue of school sports grounds has become hugely political and Michael Gove is being portrayed as the enemy of sports because he is not casting a ministerial veto. This is a small taste of what is to come for Gove: he has granted independence to hundreds of schools, who now have Academy status, and they may make all manner of other changes. They may decide to cut the costs of a science lab, and put the money towards better tuition.