Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Bank of England has been trying to clarify what it was doing when it launched its policy of forward guidance, committing not to think about tightening monetary policy until unemployment fell to 7% (provided….).  The fog is lifting somewhat, … Continue reading →

A UK, housing-industry lobby group, the Royal Institution for Chartered Surveyors, recently called for the Bank of England to try to ‘cap’ annual house price increases at 5%.  This is in the context of evidence that house prices are accelerating … Continue reading →

Notice two arguments in George Osborne’s ‘mission accomplished’ speech. 1.  After several years of declining or stagnant output, we at last have evidence of  moderate growth in official data and other positive, survey indicators.  This demonstrates that those that argued … Continue reading →

Last Summer, the ECB stemmed the panic in peripheral sovereign debt markets with a promise.  The promise was to undertake ‘Outright Market Transactions’;  purchases of short-term debt issued by troubled sovereigns, from secondary markets, in quantities not limited at the … Continue reading →

Back in April, the Treasury published a report explaining, in short, that an independent Scotland could not be a member of a currency union, managed by the Bank of England, without considerable fiscal oversight.  The Scottish National Party (SNP) dismissed … Continue reading →

Not the modest interventions to try to stimulate lending, but the huge subsidies to bank borrowing implied by the state guarantee to prevent banks failing (discussed in various writings by Andrew Haldane), which allows them to borrow from private markets … Continue reading →

Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, spoke yesterday to try to convince markets that interest rates will stay lower for longer than they expect.  Assuming that was the intention, it wasn’t very succesful. Why don’t markets share the … Continue reading →

Recently Roger Farmer published an open letter criticising Krugman’s commentary on modern macro.  He points out that Krugman frequently alludes to the fact that the Great Recession is due to self-fulfilling prophecies, without citing Roger’s prior work.  Krugman replied, explaining … Continue reading →

This is a brief response to Allister Heath, of CityAM, who has been writing and tweeting about how desirable it would be to build more new houses in the UK, and how meagre new building is in the UK compared … Continue reading →

Increasingly, I find Paul Krugman’s [PK] forays into macroeconomics (or rather, the history and sociology of macroeonomic thought) bizarre, highly selective (selected in order to back his own view that unlimited stimulus obtained anyhow is great) and ridiculous.  This post … Continue reading →