Monthly Archives: December 2017

A report in the FT today reveals that Labour commissioned two consulting firms – GFC and Clearpoint – and the report is said to conclude that the BoE’s London location “leads to the regions being underweighted in policy decisions.” The … Continue reading →

The title of this post is a play on a paper by Orhapnides [ex Governor of the central bank of Cyprus] and Wilcox, the Opportunistic Approach to Disinflation.  That paper described a policymaker that would not seek to engineer low … Continue reading →

Warning : amateur, off-topic blogging coming.  Offered in the spirit of pre-Christmas cheer. If you haven’t watched or read Nick Bostrom on the ‘Superintelligence’, you are not a self-respecting cultural omnivore. The ‘superintelligence’ is a hypothetical extreme risk to humanity … Continue reading →

Simon Wren Lewis looks at a recent research paper in the BMJ conjecturing that the Coalition ‘austerity’ program led to a flattening off of the previous downward trend in mortality (and upward trend in life-expectancy), and thus induced deaths that … Continue reading →

Jean Tirole opines in the FT about the social costs of crypto-currencies, prompted no doubt by the continued surge in the relative price of Bitcoin, depicted below [y axis in £]. Tirole writes: “Bitcoin’s social value is rather elusive to … Continue reading →