Recovery is not always smooth
There has been huge media attention about the 2011 Q2 UK GDP growth figures released today. The estimate of 0.2 per cent shows only very weak growth. It is bound to be revised either up or down as more information comes to light. But at the moment, recovery looks very weak, after more rapid growth […]
Hard problems in economics
This is a summary of a presentation I gave in Zurich earlier in June to FuturICT,one ofthe candidate flagship European Union research projects, each worth 1 billion Euros. 1.Financial markets is a very hard problem, issues of agent heterogeneity, networks, learning, financial innovation, regulation – all these and more are important. Mainstream economics has largely […]
The economic recession: where are we now, and how bad has it been?
The world economy as a whole is roaring away. The 5 per cent real GDP growth on 2010 is almost the highest annual growth rate seen over the past 20 years. And even in 2009, world output fell by only 0.5 per cent. The problems have been almost exclusively in the developed world. Looking at […]
What a good job Keynes didn’t believe in forecasting
Keynes is in many people’s minds at the moment, as uncertainty about the course of the economic recovery is high. In May 1933, at roughly the same stage in the cycle as we are today, Keynes wrote in the Times: ‘Confidence has been restored and cheap money established both on long and on short term […]
one swallow…
Of course one swallow doesn’t make a summer, but the second quarter 2010 UK GDP figures released today show output growing at an annual rate of over 4 per cent, much higher than the consensus. I wrote a piece for the Financial Times last summer arguing that ‘The historical evidence reveals a typical pattern of […]
Limits to taxation? The UK General Election 2010
The May 2010 election saw a substantial swing against the incumbent Labour government, though the Conservatives were denied an outright victory. In a fair number of marginal seats which they would have expected to win on the national trend, the swing to the Conservatives away from Labour was distinctly low. There are obviously many possible […]
extreme events, hill running and financial markets
I am currently in the Scottish Highlands for ten days or so, and my outings on the hills have made me reflect on extreme events. The fact that they lie so much outside the perceptions which people have about the world makes it very hard to appreciate that they occur at all. I’ve just finished […]
was there a double dip in the 1930s?
There is a lot of comment at the moment about the risks of a ‘double-dip’ recession, citing evidence from America in the 1930s. Well, here is the annual growth rate of real GDP in the United States in the 1930s: 1930 -8.9 1931 -7.7 1932 -13.2 1933 -2.11 1934 +7.6 1935 +7.7 1936 +14.2 1937 […]
World Cup: increasingly random outcomes
The most striking feature of world soccer is that it has become far more egalitarian in terms of performance. The gap between good and bad teams has narrowed dramatically over time. An obvious measure of this is the average number of goals scored each game in the World Cup finals. Large differences in ability will […]
cutting the deficit
The new Government’s plans to reduce the deficit much more sharply than most people expected. Will this stimulate or depress the economy? Not surprisingly there is a fierce debate about this. But it is a situation in which econometric evidence is not going to be of much use at all in arbitrating the dispute. So […]
