Monthly Archives: June 2015

Duncan Weldon reiterated, on Twitter,  a point I read Huw Pill of Goldman Sachs make a while ago. The holdup in negotiations between the Troika and Syriza is described as being over the latter’s inability to support a cut in … Continue reading →

The Chancellor has announced that he wants to legislate to force future governments to run surpluses in ‘normal times’.  Two reasons make it hard to comment definitively on this proposal.  First, the devil will be in the detail of what … Continue reading →

Amartya Sen writes on austerity, comparing the futility of the Troika extracting primary surpluses from Greece and its other debtors to the self-defeating strategy of the Entente powers extracting reparations from Germany, the subject of a blistering critique in Keynes’ … Continue reading →

In response to blogs by Robert Peston, Simon Wren Lewis, and Jonathan Portes. In Peston’s blog, he says ‘I am simply pointing out that there is a debate here’, after suggesting earlier that ‘maybe the lesson of the last Parliament… … Continue reading →

The FT carried reports of the oddest central bank Governor speech I have ever encountered.  Koruda likened the BoJ’s recent quantitative easing policy to a confidence trick.  One that would fail as soon as people stopped believing, just like Peter … Continue reading →

The Greek crisis being a spectacle of financial warfare between creditors and debtor, rather than an exercise in benign social planning, it’s instructive to think about the difficulties posed by Greek democracy in reaching an agreement, through the jaundiced eyes … Continue reading →

I just came across this by Marty Feldstein, circulated by Matt O Brien on Twitter.  And it’s mighty confusing.  The premise of the article is the puzzle that the rapid expansion of the monetary base since the onset of the … Continue reading →