Monthly Archives: September 2015

The latest vintage of UK GDP released by the Office for National Statistics has revised up growth rates through the post crisis period significantly.  It’s caused some to speculate that this vindicates George Osborne’s ‘austerity’ policies, and others to wonder … Continue reading →

This is the question posed in Robert Peston’s blog today.   My answer:  yes and no. No, also, because while no mandate, certainly not the existing BoE one, is likely to be word-perfect, there should be a pretty high bar set … Continue reading →

Two recent blogs on Corbyn, in case you missed them.  Someone responded to one of these posts:   ‘My first Corbyn of the day.  Must cut down.’ If you haven’t exceeded the recommended number of Corbyns today, click through below. … Continue reading →

Here Martin picks up on the Haldane speech about negative rates, and some of us that criticised him for supporting that option to escape the confines of the zero bound. MS rightly points out that one would not need to … Continue reading →

Picking up a point I tweeted about a few days ago, and, I think, also pointed out independently by Chris Giles…. It’s a curious thing that the right in the UK may want to leave the EU if David Cameron … Continue reading →

This speech is an interesting overview of the difficulty that faces monetary policy mandate designers in this era of low equilibrium real interest rates. AGH tilts towards reforming monetary institutions to allow for substantially negative interest rates, rejecting permanent use … Continue reading →

A quick comment on this thoughtful post by the great JP Koning, whose posts on monetary econ and finance have become regular reading for me since I found him on the internet. JP makes the point that the possibility that … Continue reading →

Here Richard Murphy points out that a rise in Bank Rate would lead to a rise in margins.  This is a fair argument. Indeed, the main reason why MPC decided not to cut rates closer to the zero floor in … Continue reading →

Strangely, for many people, that title qualifies as clickbait. It’s actually the title used by this paper, and has attracted quite a bit of attention in the popular econ media, eg on Twitter, appearing in my timeline several times.  Partly … Continue reading →

One of our objections to Corbynomics was the plan for renationalisations.  We asserted in our letter that this consumed fiscal space.  What was meant by that was that the cost of finance for governments, after a certain point, will depend … Continue reading →