Monthly Archives: April 2015

I like Wolfgang Munchau’s columns on the Eurozone crisis a lot.  But this one on claiming that macroeconomists need new tools is serious overreach.  Anyone actually building, solving or just reading others’ models, will see that it isn’t right, not … Continue reading →

Matt O’Brien has a thought-provoking piece on Wonkblog at the Washington Post. It’s about the curious business of the modern Republicans turning their back on what most mainstream economists would now view as ‘sound money’.  Namely the active use of … Continue reading →

Ben Chu kindly hosted and edited this version of an old blog post of mine on the Independent’s ‘Chunomics’ blog, explaining why think it was a bad idea for the Chancellor to let pensioners take their pensions as lump sums.

Here are some grumbles about the current econ election debate. 1.  That the Coalition claim credit for the extraordinary job-creation.  This almost certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with Government policy.  Except by comparison to some counterfactual Government that would … Continue reading →

More of a question than a post. A while ago, after reading another interesting take on Italian politics describing the many failures of that state, which ascribed the 20 year-long stagnation in GDP/head to these, I wondered:  hasn’t it always … Continue reading →