Monthly Archives: May 2017

The General Election has focused attention on how to fund ‘social care’.  This is money spent looking after people at the end of their lives when they are not able to look after themselves. The Conservative Party manifesto included the … Continue reading →

Labour’s manifesto reveals that they intend to re-nationalise water companies if they are elected.  How much would this ‘cost’? was many people’s response.  For example, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg noted that a ‘costing’ of this policy was omitted from the … Continue reading →

Myself and many others have suggested that in order to help out monetary policy when interest rates reach their effective lower bound [around 0], there should be a discretionary fiscal stimulus. My version of this is that the BoE would … Continue reading →

Martin Sandbu posed an interesting question in his Free Lunch column this week:  What can a common treasury achieve that existing institutions and national authorities can not? The question was by way of warding off French President-elect Emmanuel Macron from demanding … Continue reading →

If the document being described as a leak of a draft of the Labour manifesto really is that, the section on fiscal policy, tweeted by Robert Peston, is interesting. It contains the encouraging suggestion that HMT rules would be suspended … Continue reading →