Category Archives: Uncategorized

Simon Wren Lewis [here and here] pulls together his critique of the role of German economics in the Eurozone crisis. The Eurozone institutions had  3 flaws. First, the ECB was [at least initially] prevented from acting as a lender of … Continue reading →

One point coming out of Charlie Bean’s excellent interim review of the Office for National Statistics in the UK is that the ONS should provide better access to the underlying micro data behind our statistics. Here are two reasons why … Continue reading →

At risk of this blog degenerating into a broken record, if it has not already… Today at Treasury Committee, Robert Chote and Steve Nickell were grilled about the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecasts for the UK economy and government finances. … Continue reading →

Here’s a link.  Familiar points for anyone already reading this blog, but this time with the masterful drafting skills of Richard Barwell, my former BoE colleague, now senior economist at BNP Paribas. [‘Candour deficit’ term stolen from Gavin Kelly’s pieces … Continue reading →

As a post-script to my previous blog on the UK history of the financial crisis, it’s possible to reflect that the carve out of the FSA in 1997 from the Bank of England, and the subsequent re-incorporation of [most of] … Continue reading →

I had an interesting exchange on Twitter this morning with Rupert Harrison, formerly George Osborne’s chief of staff, now Managing Director at Black Rock, and tweeting under his own name. He wondered out loud whether the financial crisis might have … Continue reading →

Here Paul Krugman muses on how well standard macro models did at predicting the after-effects of the crisis.  He highlights how the prediction that the expansion of central bank balance sheets would NOT lead to runaway inflation was encoded in … Continue reading →