Bring Back Cedric the Pig!

Executive bonuses are back in the news. The Goldman Sachs pot of £8.3 billion has been prominent. German executive pay has overtaken that in the UK for the first time. Top management seems to have no shame. Some bad publicity, but the fat cheque remains safely in the bank account. How one longs for the […]

What the Emily Thornberry saga tells us about macroeconomic policy

It has been a wretched week for Emily Thornberry. The high-flying MP for Islington was sacked as Shadow Attorney General, and widely pilloried in both social media and conventional newsprint for tweeting a picture of a white van and England flags in Strood. Yet the saga tells us more about perception, about the narrative which […]

German revival exposes deep fissure within Europe’s economies

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Germany was seen by many as the new ‘Sick Man of Europe’. Between 1991 and 2005, GDP growth averaged only 1.2 per cent a year, compared to 3.3 per cent in the UK. Since then, the German economy has revived dramatically. The recovery in the German cluster of economies […]

Valentine’s Day: Myth and Reality

Valentine’s Day is almost upon us.  Many readers may recall a time when its main purpose was for love-struck teenagers to communicate, anonymously or otherwise, with the objects of their desire. Now, it is big business. It is hardly possible to enter a pub or restaurant without being exhorted to publicly display fidelity and love […]

Farewell Facebook?

So farewell, then, Facebook! That is the conclusion of a highly technical paper by two Princeton researchers, John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, which received a lot of publicity in the press last week. The authors conclude that “Facebook will undergo a rapid decline in the coming years, losing 80 per cent of its peak user […]

Psychology, not economics, is the key if we leave the EU

Poland is the only European country to avoid a recession during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. Polish GDP is 36 per cent higher than it was in 2005. To put this in context, the comparable figures for the UK and Germany are 5 and 12 respectively. The Polish economy has been a stunning success by […]

The Benefits of Choice: the Battle Never Ends

Do consumer choice and competition between suppliers improve the quality of outcomes for consumers? The answer might seem so obvious to many readers that it is hardly worth asking. But a powerful strand of political opinion is building up to an attack on the concept. Mary Creagh, the new Labour shadow Transport Secretary said last […]

Grangemouth highlights the competitive problems of the Rest of the UK

The recovery in the British economy is now firmly established.  Output in the services sector, the largest part of the economy, is above the previous peak level prior to the crash in 2008.   There is a widespread myth that the recovery is fueled by debt-financed personal spending. Yet since the trough of the recession in […]

Everything is crystal clear with hindsight

Are government bonds risky? This question arose a year ago, during a meeting with my bank. I wanted a low risk portfolio, but they noted that I did not want to hold UK government bonds. Whether it was the regulator who was insisting, or whether it was the way the bank was interpreting some Delphic […]

Should London be an Independent City State?

Forget Scottish independence – in his blog for  the Guardian this week Larry Elliot suggests that it is London that should devolve – a move he says that would bring an economic boost to the rest of the UK. He quotes some findings from our own Paul Ormerod about changes in unemployment at the local […]