Less austerity will always mean more tax
There is a great deal of discussion, following the election, of relaxing or even abandoning austerity. There is an equal amount of confusion about this, because the same word is being used to describe two quite separate concepts. The consequences of the government changing its policy on austerity are dramatically different, depending on which one […]
Don’t fear robots taking your job – worry about them cutting your wages
Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) seem to be in the news all the time, and breakthroughs are announced regularly. Last year, it was an AI programme which beat the world champion at Go, a game immensely more complex than chess. Now, in the austere American journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comes […]
Forward guidance is just another delusion foisted on us by mainstream macro
The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, was on good form last week when he appeared at the Treasury Committee of the House of Commons. Asked what “forward guidance” meant, he answered smoothly: “The thing about forward guidance is that it is guidance that is forward. Which is not to say it is meant to […]
The people of Burnley and Bradford have a point about the impact of immigration
The scenes as the migrant camp was cleared in Calais once again provoked bitter divisions in British society. Metropolitan luvvies and liberals tweeted their virtue and called for no restrictions on immigration. In more traditional areas, there is active resentment at the possibility of even further inflows of foreigners. When New Labour decided in the […]
Look to Twitter for why Britain’s economy proved Project Fear wrong
The economic data on post-Brexit Britain is beginning to emerge. We discovered last month that employment in May to July grew by 174,000 compared to the previous three months. Last week, the Office for National Statistics published its estimate for the output of the service sector of the economy in July. This shows a 0.4 […]
Volterra supports Paddington Quarter plans
Volterra recently supported Great Western Developments Ltd.’s application to redevelop the former Royal Mail Sorting Office and Post Office next to Paddington Station. The proposed development, Paddington Quarter, includes office, retail and café/restaurant uses across two buildings – an eighteen storey building, Paddington Cube, and a smaller two story satellite building. The scheme also encompasses […]
The blob is wrong: competition and independence raise school standards
The A-Level results released last week confirm the dominance of schools in London and the South East. Provisional league tables have only appeared so far for state schools, but these two regions have two-thirds of the top 100. South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, and Wales did not have a single school between them in the […]
Blame Jeremy Corbyn for the increasing number of public sector strikes
The total number of working days lost through labour disputes last year was, at just 170,000, the second lowest annual total since records began in 1891. What a difference a year can make. Southern Rail commuters have endured months of misery due to the prolonged series of strikes called by the RMT. Union members on […]
Why the economic picture tends to be rosier than initial estimates suggest
One of the surprises of last week was the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimate of economic growth in the second quarter of 2016, the period from April to the end of June. In the run up to Brexit, the economy expanded by 0.6 per cent on the first quarter of the year. This was […]
Sorry, Prime Minister: Legislation won’t end excess in the boardroom
A key platform of our new Prime Minister is to curb what she perceives to be boardroom excesses. “It is not anti-business to suggest that big business needs to change”, she said. One of her proposals is to allow employee and worker representatives to sit on company boards, a suggestion which has not gone down […]
