Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ben Chu kindly hosted and edited this version of an old blog post of mine on the Independent’s ‘Chunomics’ blog, explaining why think it was a bad idea for the Chancellor to let pensioners take their pensions as lump sums.

Here are some grumbles about the current econ election debate. 1.  That the Coalition claim credit for the extraordinary job-creation.  This almost certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with Government policy.  Except by comparison to some counterfactual Government that would … Continue reading →

More of a question than a post. A while ago, after reading another interesting take on Italian politics describing the many failures of that state, which ascribed the 20 year-long stagnation in GDP/head to these, I wondered:  hasn’t it always … Continue reading →

Ben Bernanke’s new blog has gripped the Econternet. Bernanke has argued that the US economy is not experiencing secular stagnation.  Sooner or later, warranted real interest rates will rise above -2 per cent, and the Fed will be free to … Continue reading →

Mark Thoma sent round this interesting post from Cecchetti and Schoenholtz’s blog, [CS] asking whether 2% inflation targets were still appropriate.  In a nutshell, they argue that if central banks were starting over, they should pick a higher number.  But … Continue reading →

Karl Whelan commented on Twitter, after the ‘ruling out’ tax change competition was replayed on Newsnight, that this might be the worst general election campaign ever.  I think he and I are too young to comment on that authoritatively, but … Continue reading →

Despite the evident contradiction in further blogging, given my ‘why bother?’ post, I thought I would explain why I tweeted ‘er, no’ in response to a blog by Robert Peston [UK BBC Economics Editor] on issue of whether the zero … Continue reading →

Danny Blanchflower remarked on Twitter that UK economic discourse lacked much engagement from academics. This was a follow-up to a Paul Krugman post where he disparaged UK economic discourse, and used as his metric the fact that there was a … Continue reading →

Daniela Gabor at UWE tweeted an interesting article on Reuters describing troubles in money markets due to a ‘shortage’ of high quality sovereign bonds in the Eurozone.  The proximate cause is the launch of the ECB’s quantitative easing program.  The … Continue reading →

I think the ‘price level shock’ fallacy is related to another fallacy that we can divine the causes and future of inflation by adding up individual price series. The price/level/inflation shock categorizer like Ian McCafferty thinks to himself: ‘oil prices … Continue reading →