Europe has suffered from the euro – just ask the Greeks
One of the entertainments of the holiday period was reading Adults In The Room, the book by Yanis Varoufakis. It describes his time as finance minister of Greece, and his negotiations with the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. Varoufakis was only in the job between January and July 2015. He had the […]
The UK could teach the Eurozone a thing or two about successful monetary unions
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published last week some figures which show how a successful monetary union works in practice. It is not obvious at first sight, from the dry heading: “regional public sector finances”. The ONS collects information on the amounts of public spending and money raised in taxes across the regions of […]
There’s substance to the Trump team’s trade critique of Germany and the Eurozone
President Trump’s administration has made many criticisms of Germany. One of the more important was by his top trade advisor, Peter Nabarro. He accused the Germans of using a “grossly undervalued” Euro to “exploit” its trading relationship with America. The complaint that when the Euro was formed the Deutschmark was too low relative to the […]
A tale of two Eurozones: Greater Germany and Club Med are drifting ever further apart
At the end of last week Federica Mogherini met leading members of the Trump administration. Mogherini, yet another Italian politician turned Euro-bureaucrat, is in fact the foreign policy chief of the European Union. She stood on her dignity, or rather the dignity of the European Commission, issuing a warning to America not to interfere with politics […]
Why the economics profession remains blind to the benefits of Brexit
The office for National Statistics last week estimated that the UK economy grew at an annual rate of 2.4 per cent in the final quarter of last year. This is slightly above the long-term average growth of the past three decades. But a Financial Times survey this month showed that the majority of economists remain […]
The NHS will never have enough cash: the English religion needs reformation
We British like traditions. A well-established one which comes round every year is the “winter crisis” in the NHS. Health provision is a political hot potato not just for this government, or indeed for any particular UK government, but for governments across the developed world. One of the key assumptions made by economists about human […]
Why Britain and the US are streets ahead of Europe in innovation
The proposed takeover of the hugely successful ARM Holdings by the Japanese giant SoftBank is in the news. Cambridge-based ARM is well placed to exploit the white hot concept of the internet of things, highlighting the UK’s recent advances in this field. The UK has also performed well in biotechnology. But the industry came under […]
Why austerity must be the order of the day for May’s chancellor
On the face of it, the Brexiteers have a bit of explaining to do. A week before the vote, Boris Johnson dismissed fears about the value of sterling, and accused the governor of the Bank of England of “talking the economy down”. Yet the economy does seem to have stalled, property funds have had to […]
How Stalin’s right-hand man could help the UK in EU exit negotiations
The topic of behavioural economics is very fashionable. But many economists remain rather sniffy about it, arguing that it often does not really add to what the discipline already knows. But one of its most distinctive and strongest results from a policy perspective is its emphasis on what is called the “architecture of choice”. Economists […]
The only way could be down for shares – and Brexit is just the catalyst
The Brexit vote creates many uncertainties, exciting or frightening depending on your predilection. One thing which is certain is that the Leave victory was delivered by the less-skilled sections of the electorate. It seems part of a more general stirring up of what we might think of as the dispossessed, those who feel left behind […]
