Some people who know me don’t believe it, but as a child I wasn’t interested in international politics. But, like most people in Britain in the 1970s, I knew the name of the Saudi oil minister, because he was a household name. Ahmed Zaki Yamani, known in the West as Sheikh Yamani, was the oil… Continue Reading
Author Archives: Simon Taylor
The case for bitcoin
People are often surprised when they ask economists, what is money, and the reply is, well, anything that fulfills the functions of money is money: money is as money does. The classic definition of money is anything that is: i) a means of payment; ii) a store of value; and iii) a unit of account.… Continue Reading
Ten years after Fukushima
What happened? At 14.46 on 11 March 2011, the largest earthquake ever to hit Japan started in the Pacific Ocean about 72km (45 miles) from the Japanese coast. Occurring in fairly shallow waters, the earthquake caused a tsunami with a maximum height of 15m (49 ft.), which struck the coast about 50 minutes later with… Continue Reading
The importance of infrastructure
People paid to worry about bad stuff happening concluded long ago that one way to destroy the USA as a functioning state would be to explode a high altitude nuclear weapon above the country; the resulting electromagnetic pulse (EMP) would destroy practically all electrical equipment, including the large transformers that make the electrical grid work.… Continue Reading
Has the US “lost” China a second time?
The shift of US attitudes on China owes as much to American disappointments as it does to changes in China’s behaviour * After the revolution that brought the Chinese Communist Party to power in 1949, a shocked US foreign policy establishment began an internal blame game as to who “lost” China. The US had previously… Continue Reading
Should oil companies invest in renewable electricity?
Oil and gas companies have few skills that are transferable to electricity generation and risk wasting a lot of their shareholders’ money. * “Peak oil” used to refer to supply but in recent years has come to mean the year when global oil demand peaks and then starts to fall. Few people now seriously dispute… Continue Reading
India and China
Recent news of increasingly lethal clashes on the long and disputed border between India and China raises a question, how have the two most populous nations on Earth previously mostly kept the peace? * “Good fences make good neighbours” Robert Frost, Mending Wall Western journalists and commentators often refer to Asia as if it were… Continue Reading
Why “Chinese virus” is wrong
I was asked a question by a student today and I thought I would share my answer in this blog. The question: “You rightly call the global financial crisis of ’08 the North American crisis – in attribution, correctly, to its origin. In the same light I was wondering why you don’t refer to the… Continue Reading
On the importance of kindness
A global epidemic can seem rather abstract, until someone you know personally is killed by it. Last week Emeritus Professor of Economics at Birmingham University Peter Sinclair died at the age of 73 from Covid-19. I and many other remember him very fondly from his days as a teacher on our Oxford MPhil Economics course,… Continue Reading
It really is different this time
A crumb of comfort during the 2008/09 financial crisis was the thought that we were living through historic times. But to face another historic event barely a decade later is perhaps a bit much. The financial – macro relationship The so-called global financial crisis (which was actually a crisis of the US financial system and… Continue Reading
Being pro-markets, not pro-business
Being pro-business risks supporting incumbent firms against new entrants – this is not good. * Economists are generally in favour of markets as ways to organise activity. Introductory microeconomics teaches students about how a competitive market brings demand and supply together efficiently: consumers get choice in what to buy, and companies are forced to be… Continue Reading
Why an abrupt tightening of climate change policy may be our only hope
To spend time with climate scientists and energy economists these days is to take part in an increasingly tortuous mental conflict. Outwardly, scientists, policy analysts and academics hoping to influence policy must remain positive and optimistic, while keeping a strong sense of urgency. Privately, many are in despair at the lack of progress on cutting… Continue Reading
Some recent books that help explain the world
I see my job as trying to understand what is going on in the world of economics and finance, mainly by reading the research of others, and communicating it as best I can to others. It’s a privilege of my job that I have the time to read some of the fascinating books produced by… Continue Reading
Institutions seldom die
Recent news that the EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) is thinking of lending to Sub-Saharan Africa shows how institutions evolve to find new goals rather than quietly close down. The EBRD, which I believe enjoys a high reputation in the development finance world, is a multilateral financial institution set up in 1991 to… Continue Reading
Could China’s population halve by the end of the century?
Demography, the study of population, is one of the few areas of the social sciences where long term predictions (over one or more decades) can have some value. This is because the dynamics of population growth depend on the current age structure (how many young versus old people), which is fixed in the short term,… Continue Reading