Monthly Archives: November 2014

A quick reaction to Andrew Haldane’s latest speech, released this morning.  After a great survey of the literature on behavioural econ and finance, and economic psychology, he says: “The Bank is about to embark on what will be, in the … Continue reading →

There is continuing debate on the blogosphere about whether, contrary to common monetary economics parlance, interest rates are not low because inflation is low, but low interest rates are actually causing low inflation, with more contributions from John Cochrane, Noah … Continue reading →

A quick Bank of England Inflation Report Press Conference Post Mortem. The headline seems to be that MPC is forecasting a larger, protracted deviation of CPI inflation below the 2 per cent target.  That is despite some softening in the … Continue reading →

Adair Turner’s FT piece urges the central bank/government to finance future debt with helicopter money.  Leaving aside the merits of helicopter money, I found his argumentation unusual.  It’s a piece worth taking seriously, because one presumes there must be a … Continue reading →

This converts a tweet-rant [trant?] into a quick post. I’m against George Osborne’s reported proposal for a Northern Sovereign Wealth Fund to ring-fence public proceeds from developing shale gas reserves.  Or, in fact, against any localised sovereign wealth fund for … Continue reading →

This is prompted by SWL’s mainlymacro post on Kocherlakota’s comments about the Fed’s objectives. Kocherlakota and Simon want clarification that the target is symmetric. Simon suspects that the asymmetry in the ECB’s objective implied by the words ‘close to but … Continue reading →

John Kay reminds us in his latest FT column that inflation is a statistical chimera. From time to time, new things are invented or desired, and old things no longer bought, and all the time what we buy gets improved. … Continue reading →