Some remarkable insights were disclosed in the FT report of the Milken Institute’s annual gathering of the investment, business and political elites this week in California. I don’t know who these people are but no matter – if they are indeed the elite then they seemed to have garnered marginally more insight than our lot…… Read more
Category:
Economics
Economics Theory
Westminster: Most Similar Country Ireland? – A new EU Regional Productivity Analysis
Introduction An interesting paper “The big European sort? The diverging fortunes of Europe’s regions” has been published by the Centre for European Reform (CER). Such papers are of great interest at PP. The paper analyses regional productivity. As a single metric productivity is one of the best, but as Charles Adams says, in order to… Read more
Regional inequality: the utility of many metrics
To measure – political success or anything else – we need to choose the right metrics. It is widely recognised that GDP per capita or average income is not necessarily that useful. A point that must be repeated over and over is that when in comes to wealth and income, it is not the crude average… Read more
Do Economists know anything?
I attended a short lecture with this provocative title and you may guess the answer from the length of this piece…. A more detailed conclusion was really the old one – yes, but more and more about less and less. Everyone was studying such specialist fields that they had lost sight and certainly understanding of… Read more
The Logic of Spend and Tax
To continue on from yesterday’s blog about where people think money comes from and how it is created, now people realise that the era when money rested on the value of gold has long past, so most, these days, seem to consider that money comes from tax. After all everyone ‘knows’ that there is no… Read more
MMT is real gold
The misleading title is because one reader has suggested (thank you, Damien) that I might respond to an ‘Economist’ article on MMT (Modern Monetary Theory). Which seems to go under various headings ‘Magic or logic?’ ‘Nutty or essential?’ depending on which Economist edition you are reading. Remarkably, it summarises MMT fairly well, whilst pointing out… Read more
Money is abstract not physical
There is an interesting piece from Joanna Montgomerie of King’s College London, on Storytelling about Debt in which she calls out the: …£1.64 trillion of private debt [86% of GDP]. This enormous stock of debt must be fed a steady stream of present-day income, flowing from households… and she shows that this private debt is almost… Read more
Thinking like China
There is a very interesting piece in the FT about China building a road in Montenegro, to link the Adriatic port of Bar to Serbia’s capital Belgrade. The Montenegrin government’s borrowing from China to finance the road’s cost, estimated at €1.3bn, has sent the country’s debt soaring from 63 per cent of gross domestic product… Read more
Universal Basic Services (UBS) and also UBI?
There is a very interesting article ‘Can we have UBS and UBI?’ on what appears to be a new site devoted to Universal Basic Services (UBS). UBI is of course Universal Basic Income. It says: When we think about how to transition to a 21st century future that will deliver a larger life for the… Read more
Rent to prosper – or not?
There was an interesting item buried in the ‘Next’ retailer’s annual report (click to read it!) It expresses some optimism on their shop rents. Their leases run on average for only six years (which actually seems short to me) but at a 25% reduction on their current costed basis. That is very good news for… Read more