The fiscal responses of six European countries to the Great Recession

January 10, 2016

  The issue of public spending and taxation is central to the political debate in Britain, but the financial crisis that started in 2008, and the prolonged great recession that followed it, didn’t just strain public sector finances in the UK, it dislocated public budgets across Europe. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has just published […]

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Where is the UK economy heading?

January 4, 2016

  The issue of the UK economy and how best to recover from the damage done by the Great Recession is the central issue of national politics. The narrative promoted rigorously by the Tory government and the Chancellor George Osborne is that the country was almost bankrupted by the Labour government and that slowly but […]

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The Cumbrian floods – a bit of context

December 27, 2015

  All rivers flood occasionally, bursting their banks and inundating the surrounding flood plains. That’s why the flat areas around rivers are called flood plains. In 2000 the UK was required to accept the European Water Framework Directive (EWF) into UK law. Until 2000 and the EU directive, for all of recorded history, it almost […]

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All the world’s money – an infographic

December 22, 2015

  The chart below (source) shows all of the world’s money and financial markets in one visualisation. Each square represents $100 billion. As you scroll down note how large global debt is (both public and private) in relation to the total amount of money in the system. The real eye opener is when you reach […]

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Hot money

December 20, 2015

  Global capital flows played an important part in the destabilisation of the financial system prior to the crisis of 2008. Working out what capital flows are occurring in the world economy, how much capital is flowing, where capital is coming from and going to, is made difficult because a significant proportion of the capital […]

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Some good news for a change

December 15, 2015

  I have written before about the way that a pessimistic view of the world, which has no basis in fact and is not supported by any data, has become embedded in our popular culture. In popular discourse it is taken as a given that the world is in a bad shape and getting worse. […]

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More recent items of interest

December 11, 2015

  Reuters is reporting that China says loss-making state firms should exit market China’s state-owned firms that suffer three consecutive years of losses should exit the market through bankruptcy or other means, the country’s state asset supervisor said in a statement on Friday. “We will close, suspend, combine, divert, peel off or reorganize long-term, loss-making […]

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Some recent items of interest

December 10, 2015

  Back in June Prospect magazine published an article entitled “The SNP has failed Scotland”. I only just stumbled across it and its worth a read. The article’s concluding paragraph says this: “Over the past decade, the SNP has proven itself to be the most successful political party in Europe. It has won seemingly impossible […]

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Electoral breakthrough for Front National

December 7, 2015

In the first round of the French regional elections the Front National made very large gains and is likely to secure control of some regions after the second round of voting. The Front National finished top in six of 13 regions on Sunday. The NF Leader Marine Le PenLe and her 25-year-old niece Marion Marechal-Le […]

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Draghi disappoints

December 6, 2015

  There was a big build up of expectations before the meeting of the European Central Bank council last Thursday that a big, or at least significant, program of further monetary stimulation would be announced. The eurozone has been bumping along in a more or less depressed state since the crisis of 2010 (see my […]

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The state of the eurozone

December 2, 2015

  The Eurozone is over fifteen years old. How is it doing? The currency was introduced in non-physical form (traveller’s cheques, electronic transfers, banking, etc.) at midnight on 1 January 1999, when the national currencies of participating countries (the eurozone) ceased to exist independently. Their exchange rates were locked at fixed rates against each other. […]

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China’s ghost cities

November 21, 2015

  In the previous post “What is happening in China?” I explained that the Chinese economy had become seriously unbalanced and that a very deep restructuring must take place to correct the imbalances. The Chinese economy is unbalanced because it has a very low rate of consumption (the lowest GDP proportion of consumption in history) […]

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What is happening in China?

November 13, 2015

  The existing Chinese growth model is unsustainable and is coming to an end. This means that deep and large structural adjustments have begun that will change the entire shape of the Chinese economy. The metric currently most used to measure the success and health of the Chinese economy is the rate of growth of […]

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Some recent items of interest

November 8, 2015

  Joschka Fischer who was the Green Party German Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor from 1998-2005 has an article on the Project Syndicate website entitled “The Return of Geopolitics to Europe” The Atlantic magazine has an interesting article entitled “Russia and the Curse of Geography – Want to understand why Putin does what he does? […]

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Greek suffering is about to deepen

November 7, 2015

The average Greek has suffered deeply in financial terms during the economic crisis. Only in the last few weeks a raft of data has highlighted Greeks economic plight. According to Credit Suisse’s annual Wealth Report, average wealth in Greece has fallen by 28.7 percent since 2008, hastened by plummeting property prices and a collapsing stock […]

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Syria’s tangled proxy wars: a simple visual guide

November 5, 2015

Syria’s civil war began four years ago with protests against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and the Ba’ath Party dictatorship. When those protests were suppressed with ruthless violence the protests evolved into an armed rebellion and then into full scale civil war. In the chaos of the civil the Islamists ISIS emerged as a powerful […]

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The worst European refugee crisis Since World War II in one animated infographic

November 5, 2015

The animated infographic below shows the flow of refugees into Europe. This is the worst European refugee crisis since World War II. The infographic is from the Lucify website and it will will take a moment to load – so be patient. When its loaded you can hover your cursor over various parts of the […]

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Labour’s real fiscal record

November 2, 2015

  Historically Labour governments have been more fiscally “conservative” than Conservative ones. The current false “truth” endlessly repeated by those who would benefit from its propagation, and by those who should know better, is that Labour governments are fiscally profligate and/or incompetent compared to Conservative governments. In fact the data shows that on balance labour […]

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Winners and losers in the eurozone

October 29, 2015

The Irish, Greeks and Spanish lost more personal wealth than any other population in the eurozone in the aftermath of the financial crisis, according to fresh data on household wealth from the European Central Bank. The research, published ahead of the issuing of a new Household Sector Report next month, shows that Greece lost on […]

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Maastricht and All That

October 27, 2015

The great British economist Wynne Godley who died in 2010 (his Guardian obituary written by William Keegan is here) wrote a short article in the London Review of Books in 1992 entitled “Maastricht and All That”. The article is an astonishingly prescient critique of the deep design flaws in the plans for European Monetary Union […]

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