When The Facts Change

Why I'm starting this Substack, who I am - and why you might want to subscribe

The great 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes is often credited with saying, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Others attribute the quotation to Keynes’s acolyte Paul Samuelson, the first American to win a Nobel prize in economics.

Whoever originally coined these words, they capture what strikes me as a highly-commendable way to think about the world – the use of evidence-based analysis, rooted in history but always alive to new developments, as an antidote to the deeply-entrenched, political-loaded groupthink that seems to characterise so much of what passes for journalism, academic work and our broader policy and political debate these days.

When the Facts Change is a London-based Substack that examines the economics and politics of the UK and the Western world in the context of the fast-emerging new world order.

While analysis and reportage relating to the UK will be the focus, WTFC will range widely, covering not just Europe and the US, but also the large “emerging markets” - particularly Russia, India and China, countries where I have worked and travelled extensively.

The world is in flux – as “the advanced industrialised societies” age, putting severe pressure on our public finances, while the still rapidly expanding economies of the East account for an ever-larger share of global commerce.

Productivity has stagnated, with growth remaining sluggish in the UK, US and across the the Western world ever since the 2008 financial crisis – a situation compounded by draconian Covid-related lockdowns, not least in Britain, sparking a renewed frenzy of “quantitative easing” and the shouldering of even more sovereign debt.

In many ways, there has never been a better time to be alive than the first quarter of the 21st century. Life-expectancy is rising across much of the world and the share of the global population living in absolute poverty has plunged over recent decades – not least due to the rapid spread of capitalism and the retreat of an over-bearing state in countless post-Communist nations following the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

Yet, across much of the West, the default economic optimism that characterised the late 1980s and 1990s now too often gives way to gloom – with older generations, for the first time in several centuries perhaps, watching their children struggling and often failing to achieve living standards comparable to those of their parents.

WTFC takes the view that the Western world, with its rule-of-law, freedoms and technological prowess, remains capable of creating and maintaining enormous wealth and security for its people. But recent generations of politicians, lawmakers and opinion-formers have lost their way.

Taxation is too high, the state has grown far too big and bloated and the “Overton window” – the acceptable boundaries of mainstream opinion – has become too narrow, detached from reality. Much of the elite political and media class which tries to set and maintain such boundaries seems to disdain the rest of the population – not only looking down on them but often undermining democracy itself, as increasingly technocratic governments cede power to domestic and international bureaucrats, while weakening nation states and attempting to silence often entirely reasonable protest and dissent.

About me – Liam Halligan

WTFC is written by me, Liam Halligan. I’m a British/Irish print and broadcast journalist with more than three decades of experience working for leading media organisations including The Financial Times, The Economist and Channel Four News. But I’m also a professional economist, a trained statistician and have considerable business experience.

I’ve written my weekly Economics Agenda column in The Sunday Telegraph for more than twenty years – and I will continue to do that while developing this Substack, as well as co-presenting the “Planet Normal” podcast each week with my fellow Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson.

But I’ve launched WTFC to give me more scope to explore the economics and politics not just of the UK, but also Western Europe and the US in the context of the massive societal, technological and geopolitical shifts now afoot across the world.

For the reality is that my mainstream media outlets don’t provide me with nearly enough scope to write about the multitude of subjects which interest me – across the gamut of economics, politics and business, in the UK and elsewhere – or to broadcast about them to the extent they deserve.

What motivates me is reporting and explaining in a clear and accessible way complex events and ideas that really matter to a broad audience. I’ve tried to do this over many years across various print and broadcast organisations - but have often felt thwarted, not least by editors who dismiss economics and business as “boring”.

I know in my bones, though, not least from the thousands of letters and emails I’ve received from audiences over the years, to say nothing of countless conversations and social media interactions, that there is a huge public appetite for accessible economic analysis – delivered with clarity and hopefully a bit of personality – that attempts to make sense of an increasingly inter-connected and often confusing world.

Whether I’m discussing the UK’s fiscal position, Western net-zero policies or the geopolitical niceties of semiconductor manufacturing and the “fifth industrial revolution” that is artificial intelligence, my experience is that there is enormous demand among the general public for credible information about the economic and business realities that so profoundly affect the lives of them and their families.

I’m often told that I am quite good at explaining complex ideas to a broad audience – and I hope that’s true. But I have come to sad conclusion that many of the UK’s mainstream media “gatekeepers” – certainly in broadcasting – think that the general public lacks intelligence and only wants mindless controversy and often moronic politically-tribal debate.

In my experience, much of the public, in the UK and elsewhere, is actually incredibly smart – often way ahead of the mainstream media. They want entertainment and diversion, of course they do! But they also want detail and nuance, above all when it comes to economics, money and business coverage, particularly when times are tough – as they currently are.

Yet proper economics and business coverage, with some honourable exceptions, is gradually being squeezed out of the mainstream media. These vital subjects certainly struggle to get airtime on mass-reach TV and radio. The cultural push-back from often economically illiterate yet financially comfortable “broadcast executives” is huge – and I should know.

That is why is have decided to “take the plunge” and set up shop “on my own platform” – albeit with help from the good folk at Substack.

WTFC will start with written posts in the first instance – but as I find my feet on this platform, I will introduce both audio and video interviews as well as a weekly “livestream” programme.

Please follow WTFC, preferably taking out a paid subscription to ensure full access to my posts and publication archives and consider making a donation. The intention is that Substack becomes the focus of my work, allowing me to employ production and research assistants and ultimately developing into my main source of income.

So please help me to give this project the time and energy it deserves.

Mission Statement

WTFC will attempt to explore and explain complex economic, business and financial issues that affect the lives of millions and millions of people in the UK, across the Western world and beyond.

Britain’s post-Brexit years were always going to be the most intense period of policymaking since the Thatcher era. Combine that with “levelling-up” – an ongoing attempt to tackle woeful regional inequalities – and the reform agenda looks busier still. The impact of the Covid lockdown, on the UK economy and broader society, points to even greater policy upheaval – equivalent, perhaps, to the years after 1945, the forging of Britain’s post-war “New Jerusalem”.

The Covid pandemic has reshaped the UK and much of the world – on so many fronts. The basic idea of “going to work” has been upended, while the demise of High Streets everywhere has accelerated as online retailing has surged. Britain’s grotesque housing crisis has come into sharp focus – the subject of my latest book “Home Truths” –  with broader regional inequalities also becoming more acute. And since the end of lockdown, we’ve seen rising inflation and a nasty cost-of-living crisis – with “the economy, stupid” convulsing and dominating our politics.

Across the Western world, some fifteen years after the Lehman crisis, stocks and bonds once again look dangerously over-valued and ripe for a fall, with fragile financial markets reliant on the utterances of desperate central bankers who increasingly lack credibility. We live in astonishing economic times – with national debts spiralling and even “advanced nations” having convinced themselves “it’s different this time” and “we can just print money”.

Ordinary people sense both economic danger and opportunity from this ongoing uncertainty and upheaval – be they ordinary employees, business owners or investors. Yet when it comes to these huge economic and financial issues, much of the mainstream media – major broadcasters in particular – have very little to say.

WTFC will try to fill at least part of that gap. This Substack will be not so much about share prices, takeovers and corporate results – although such subjects will sometimes be covered. WTFC is more about the nexus of money, politics and power. It will cover both benefit scams and corporate scams – financial issues impacting regular folk as well as moguls. It will analyse oil prices, trade wars and currencies – seemingly remote global events, but with huge local and national repercussions.

WTFC will help readers and viewers to understand who really pulls their purse strings. It will feature not only agenda-setting analysis but will also break news stories and host eye-catching guests – hopefully generating headlines elsewhere. Politics is interesting – and WTFC will rightly cover plenty of politics. But economics, business and finance are also interesting and arguably more important – yet they are not covered nearly enough by mainstream media outlets in a way that is accessible and interesting to the vast majority of the public.

In these uncertain times, we need no-holds barred analysis of the economic opportunities and dangers facing Britain, Europe and the rest of the world. Why can’t my kid buy a house? Will robots take my job? Is QE money-printing dangerous? Is net-zero a busted flush? Will the dollar remain the world’s reserve currency – and would its demise topple US hegemony? Will Trump’s tariffs work for the US – or will they drive the world’s biggest economy into a recession, while sparking a disastrous global trade war? Will China become more aggressive – economically and militarily –and try to take over the world?

WTFC will cover all these issues and more. It will take hopefully well-informed potshots at conventional wisdom, airing uncomfortable truths. And it will do so in the context of the ongoing shift of commercial power and influence away from the West and towards Asia – which is, undeniably, the most significant economic and political mega-trend of our time.

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“To inform, educate AND entertain …”

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I’ve written a long one instead”. So said American statesman and polymath Benjamin Franklin. Or was it George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill or Mark Twain? These words have been attributed to all of them.

The source of this quotation is actually contested, as is the quotation – When The Facts Change…” – which forms the name of this Substack. Most scholars, though, maintain that the phrase was first coined by French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.

Wherever it came from, this pithy aphorism captures perfectly what every decent journalist instinctively knows. Producing a concise, penetrating piece of writing takes a lot more talent and effort – and much more clarity of thought – than cobbling together a seemingly endless stream of loose, ill-defined, meandering prose.

“The shorter and the plainer the better,” said Beatrix Potter. She was right, of course. So was Shakespeare when he gave Polonius that immortal line in Hamlet: “Brevity is the soul of wit”.

These days, of course, “wit” generally means humour - and WTFC will certainly endeavour to be light-hearted from time to time. Anyone who watched me on BBC television’s This Week over the years, or who listens to the weekly “Planet Normal” podcast, knows that while I often grapple with serious subjects, I like to break up the analysis with some flashes of comic relief.

But “wit” also more traditionally refers to intelligence – as in “having your wits about you” and a “half-wit” having almost none. And in that context, Shakespeare is correctly (if ironically in the case of Polonius) conveying that a lot more can often be said with less language, if it’s the right language. In other words, being brief, but communicating effectively anyway, is a sign of genuine intelligence.

As such, WTFC will endeavour to provide relatively short, fast-moving and engaging content – with occasional humour and bonhomie – be it in the form of written posts, interviews or video explainers. Your time is valuable and you engage with writers and journalists not only to be informed and educated, but also to be entertained. That’s something I will never forget.

Thanks for reading to the end of my very first Substack post. The first, I hope, of many. Please spread the word. And if you’ve got this far, WTFC is surely worth backing - as a Founding Member, Monthly or Annual subscriber !!

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