One of the entertainments of the holiday period was reading Adults In The Room, the book by Yanis Varoufakis. It describes his time as finance minister of Greece, and his negotiations with the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. Varoufakis was only in the job
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The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published last week some figures which show how a successful monetary union works in practice. It is not obvious at first sight, from the dry heading: “regional public sector finances”. The ONS collects information on the amounts of public spending and
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President Trump’s administration has made many criticisms of Germany. One of the more important was by his top trade advisor, Peter Nabarro. He accused the Germans of using a “grossly undervalued” Euro to “exploit” its trading relationship with America. The complaint that when the Euro was formed
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At the end of last week Federica Mogherini met leading members of the Trump administration. Mogherini, yet another Italian politician turned Euro-bureaucrat, is in fact the foreign policy chief of the European Union. She stood on her dignity, or rather the dignity of the European Commission, issuing a
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Economic forecasters are in the dock. Last week, none other than the chief economist of the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, was confessing the crimes of the profession. The failure to predict the financial crisis was, Haldane said, economic forecasting’s “Michael Fish” moment. Thirty years ago, the
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So farewell then, Matteo Renzi! The resignation of the Italian Prime Minister after his heavy defeat in Sunday’s referendum on constitutional reform has created turmoil. Fears have been resurrected about the stability of the Italian banking system, and even the possibility of Italy leaving the euro has
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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
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Sports fans will all be familiar with the commentator who almost always gets things wrong. “Arsenal are very much on top here” he – it is invariably a “he” – will pronounce, or “Root is looking very settled”, only for the opposition to score a goal immediately
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On the face of it, the Brexiteers have a bit of explaining to do. A week before the vote, Boris Johnson dismissed fears about the value of sterling, and accused the governor of the Bank of England of “talking the economy down”. Yet the economy does seem
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The topic of behavioural economics is very fashionable. But many economists remain rather sniffy about it, arguing that it often does not really add to what the discipline already knows. But one of its most distinctive and strongest results from a policy perspective is its emphasis on
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