What would Keynes have said? Ouija board active!
The loss of triple A status on UK government bonds has intensified the demands for a Plan B. So-called Keynesians demand an increase in both public spending and the public sector deficit. What might Keynes himself have said about the current situation? Lacking a Ouija board, I am unable to communicate directly with the great […]
Networks, the North and Prosperity
What can be done about the North? The gap between London and the South East grows and grows. The response of many in the political class in the North is the dispiriting whinge of entitlement. The Leader of Newcastle Council has recently attracted national publicity for his decision to cut all arts funding in the […]
Entrepreneurship and the filthy rich
Peter Mandelson famously said that he was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. As was the case with many aspects of New Labour, he was working firmly in the Leninist intellectual tradition. Some 20 years earlier, the then leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, stated that ‘to get rich is glorious’. The […]
Today Singapore and Japan, Tomorrow China
It has suddenly become fashionable to be concerned about China’s growth rate slowing down. This is not a matter of a short-run cyclical downturn, with normal service being resumed shortly as the economy roars ahead once more. It is a worry that there will be a permanent slowdown by the end of this decade. Instead […]
Tax cuts, public spending and morality
Kier Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, has vowed to ‘ramp up’ prosecutions against individuals for tax evasion five-fold in two years. He has made clear his plan to target middle-class earners, citing as examples ‘lawyers, tax consultants and plumbers’, an intriguing perspective on the British class system, or perhaps we are all middle-class now. […]
Springtime for America
Is America heading for a boom? Real GDP has risen for 13 successive quarters and now stands 3 per cent above its peak level. A net total of 4.8 million jobs has been created over the past three years, with a fall of half a million in the public sector being massively outweighed by the […]
Telling the Truth about the Retirement Age
In a democracy, it is always a risky business for politicians to tell the electorate things they do not want to hear. So Steve Webb, the pensions minister, must be congratulated. He told the truth about the retirement age. In a speech last week he stated bluntly: ‘If someone tells a 30 year old what […]
Meat and potato pies and the Nobel Prize in economics
Tragedy struck at a mid-week game played during the holiday season in Football League Division Two. The pies ran out in the home supporters’ bar. The incident may seem trivial to those not involved. Yet it illustrates some important themes in economics, which have even gained their inventors the Nobel Prize. It turns out that […]
A quiz for the end of 2012
There are many puzzles about the economy, and in the holiday spirit a quiz is provided at the end. A bottle of champagne from me to the winner, the drawn will be from correct entries on the 31st. It might be difficult predicting the outcome of the fiscal cliff in the US. But at least […]
Bankers, Greens and the Barking Mad: When Prophesy Fails
Forecasts of the end of the world have an even worse track record than predictions in economics. Some followers of the Mayan calendar believe the world will end next week. But we have been here before. In 1956, an American group, led by a suburban housewife, believed that a catastrophic flood would destroy the world […]
