Monthly Archives: July 2015

Simon Wren Lewis writes thoughtfully about my post arguing that Andrew Haldane should keep his views on matters outside the BoE’s remit to himself.  It’s socially wasteful to clip the wings of visionary thinkers, he points out. However, a few … Continue reading →

Andrew Haldane, BoE chief economist, was interviewed by Newsnight’s Duncan Weldon, and he makes many interesting remarks.  Including comments that firms are too short-termist, are not spending enough on investment, are returning far too much money to  shareholders [this is … Continue reading →

Paul Krugman complains at the harmful focus on the long-term in US fiscal policy, fighting to solve problems that are too distant to matter, while the need for short-term stimulus is neglected. Just a conjecture, but I wonder if the … Continue reading →

It’s becoming almost a standard narrative that actually the crisis was not caused by the Greek’s overborrowing, but instead by inadequate demand in Germany, needing involuntary demand for Germany’s exports to stabilise Germany, a demand that later wreaks havoc. Before … Continue reading →

Amusing:  just after blogging about why I think making a plan ready for Grexit would have been self-fulfilling, and sabotaging of plan A, Charles Wyplosz writes on VoxEU that they should indeed be doing that now. His argument is – … Continue reading →

Some are debating why Syriza appeared to have no plan B when it became clear that their strategy of trying to gain significantly easier terms for a new bailout was going to fail.  Paul Krugman puts it down to incompetence.  … Continue reading →

Recently, ex-MPC member Danny Blanchflower, known for his ‘dove-ish’ views on interest rates, wondered who would get the ‘dove-ish’ seat on the Monetary Policy Committee that David Miles was vacating [leave aside that DM would reject that label], and Danny … Continue reading →

Mark Carney hints that interest rates may rise at the end of the year, and many of the more compressed media pieces on his intervention turn a hint about the obvious into something that sounds like a racing certainty.  For … Continue reading →

A new dilemma for David Cameron. On the one hand, he will want to make a show of objecting to the EU using the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism [for which the UK would most likely be on the hook] to … Continue reading →

Willem Buiter and co at Citi [no link, since it’s a proprietory research note] propose to transfer regulation and ownership of Greek banks out of the Greek state, and into a common entity owned and controlled by the remaining Eurozone … Continue reading →