This is how Brexit will actually affect the economy over the next 10 years on December 11, 2017If you think the Brexit debate has become unpleasantly ill-tempered, I’m afraid that is something that we had better get used to. It will become a lot more unpleasant and it will go on a long, long time. In the past couple of days the impasse over the Northern Ireland border has shifted the focus […]
This is what the Queens speech means for the economy on June 26, 2017The business and financial communities are supposed to like strong government, so they know where they stand and can plan for it. But in the past couple of weeks, and especially now after the Queen’s Speech, they have been swinging round to the view that weak government might be rather good news. A government that […]
Why a weak government might be good for our economy on June 12, 2017Weak politics may make for good economics. This is contrary to the proposition that the Government presented to the British electorate, that the Government needed a strong mandate to negotiate Brexit. Now, among the myriad uncertainties facing the country there is one certainty. The UK will have a weak government, led by a weak Prime […]
Can we trust the financial markets to predict the election outcome? on June 5, 2017If there is a huge problem trusting opinion polls, then there is an even bigger one trusting the markets. But they are different. The trouble with polls is that they have to work on too little information. The trouble with markets is that they have too much. You can see this in the past few […]
The US is in the midst of new industrial revolution but not everyone is benefitting on May 8, 2017The first 100 days of the Trump presidency may have been lacklustre, and the first three months of the year certainly showed disappointing GDP growth – only 0.7 per cent annual rate. For high-tech America, this quarter has been a scorcher. So what matters more? This week saw the share price of Amazon, the Google […]
Five things to look out for in the global economy this week on April 10, 2017Now that Brexit week – the formal triggering of Article 50 and the response – is past, the focus will shift back to the world economy. But just to follow through a point made last week: the tone of both the UK letter and the EU response suggested that both sides were eager to make […]
There are bigger problems with the American tax system than Donald Trumps returns on March 20, 2017PRESUMABLY he leaked them himself. Donald Trump’s tax returns for 2005 landed in a journalist’s post-box in an unmarked envelope, and it does not take forensic scrutiny to see that it is marked “client copy”. Well, maybe it was some else who filched it from his files, but in the broader scheme of things it […]
The triggering of Article 50, and four other things to look out for in economics this week on March 20, 2017Top of the list, for Britons at least, will be the triggering of Article 50 to prepare for the UK leaving the EU. In theory, this may happen as early as Tuesday, but Wednesday or later is quite possible. The day does not matter. The response does. That response is in part what happens in […]
Big data could help economists avoid any more Michael Fish moments on January 8, 2017The “Michael Fish moment” may not mean much to American readers but for anyone over the age of 50 in the UK it has a nostalgic resonance: Michael Fish was the unlucky weather forecaster who assured TV viewers that there would not be a hurricane on Thursday 15 October 1987, the afternoon before the worst […]
How will the world economy react to Trumponomics? on November 20, 2016Three days into the Trump election victory it is becoming clear that this is not just a seismic political shock. It is also an economic shock of equal magnitude. It signals the end of ultra-loose monetary policy but offset by looser fiscal policy. The ruling orthodoxy that has swept right across the developed world since […]