Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

The Government is struggling to avoid releasing the complete 58 ‘Brexit impact studies’. David Davis mentioned that these existed ‘in excruciating detail’.  It was later claimed, in a manner that the government must have realised would be taken to be … Continue reading →

The OBR has followed the Bank of England and downgraded its medium/long-term forecast of the growth in the productive potential of the economy.  It now thinks only 1.6% is likely.  This comes after 10 years of zero productivity growth has … Continue reading →

In a short table.  Caveat:  Declan Gaffney tells me Ireland are not ok with turning a blind eye to smuggling people and things, as indicated below. The argument for the Y is that it allows Ireland a de facto frictionless … Continue reading →

Owen Jones writes in the Guardian that we should consider mandating a compulsory maximum 4 day week.  One of the hopes is that this would ‘slash unemployment and underemployment’. This is a common example of what economists call the ‘lump … Continue reading →

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee raised interest rates for the first time today since 2007. So here is a quick post-mortem on the November 2017 Inflation Report. I would have voted against a rate rise today, for a … Continue reading →