Monthly Archives: December 2014

At the next Monetary Policy Committee vote, most are expecting Martin Weale and Ian McCafferty to vote for a 0.25pp rise in interest rates.  They have been voting for just this since August. The curious thing, if you look at … Continue reading →

Had a great lunch with an economist friend who alerted me to something that is obvious, but I had not thought of, and who then explained it wonderfully.  (And then returned to find Twitter full of it too.)  That there … Continue reading →

Pontus Rendahl, a rising star in macroeconomics at Cambridge, makes a revealing comment on my previous post about Aditya Chakrabortty’s idiotic and ill-informed Radio 4 program on economics.  I’ll quote it full here: I was approached, not by BBC, but … Continue reading →

Robert Peston has been basking in the unusual distinction – for a journalist – of getting a pasting from Paul Krugman, and the somewhat less unusual distinction of criticism from Simon Wren Lewis.  Simon has coined a phrase to describe … Continue reading →

Paul Krugman and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard have been jousting on the question of whether the central bank can create inflation at the zero bound or not.  I don’t think either of them have teased out all the subtleties, and, partly as … Continue reading →

What a day for BoE watchers, and particularly for ex-BoE people like myself.  At Treasury Committee in March this year, perhaps prompted by media coverage [eg this and this by Mike Bird, and this by Chris Giles] of the revelation … Continue reading →

This morning [4/12] on BBC Radio 4’s Today program, George Osborne lashed out at the BBC’s coverage of the budget labelling it ‘hyperbolic’. This is a pretty low tactic, and also substantively wrong.  All the BBC were doing is pointing … Continue reading →

Last night I caught AC’s Radio 4 program on teaching economics after the financial crisis.  It’s a great story, well told.  But, it is just that.  In its totality, a distorting dramatisation, on account of allowing multiple silly, uninformed critiques … Continue reading →