Remember all the commentary on the impending disaster of US federal government deficits? Which would force the cutting or closure of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and anything that helps low income or economically unlucky people? Well the US still has … Continued
I’ve written before about the threat to the major gas exporters, such as Russia, of the sudden increase in prospective world gas supply from unconventional (shale) gas, first in the US but soon in other countries. My argument is from … Continued
A lot of hedge fund managers seem to believe that the Fed and other central banks that have been using unconventional monetary policy, specifically “quantitative easing” (see note 1), are dooming us to much higher inflation in future. Some believe … Continued
I had the impression that wage inflation in China, especially in the manufacturing heartland of the south, had pushed up wages relative to other low cost economies. But I hadn’t realised how big the gap had become. A new blog … Continued
You might find it odd that any country wants to join the Eurozone, given the continued mess the world’s second biggest economy is in. While the markets have stopped pricing in a high risk of the extreme event of a … Continued
Yesterday I went to Oxford to attend the third TEDx Oxbridge event, out of curiosity, a desire to learn how to be a better speaker and to hear some interesting stuff – and to just get out of Cambridge for … Continued
Undergraduates at Cambridge do their final exams in late May and early June. No matter how well they have done in the rest of their three years at Cambridge, their degree class (*) will depend entirely on their performance during … Continued
Despite the mostly friendly rivalry and healthy competitiveness between them, the universities of Cambridge and Oxford are far more alike than different. A neutral visitor to both would be struck by their similarities, the differences largely consisting in geography (Oxford … Continued
Timothy Taylor’s blog comments on the latest World Bank Africa’s Pulse report, which has some encouraging data and analysis about the African economy. Having for so long been the laggard region of the world economy, sub-Saharan Africa has sometimes seen a … Continued
When I used to teach an MBA elective on capital markets, I would say that if the students remembered only one thing from the course it should be that on average active fund managers fail to beat the market and … Continued
Many commentators use John Maynard Keynes’ quotation “In the long run we are all dead” to suggest that Keynes, and by association those economists today who urge a moderation of government austerity policies, didn’t care about the future. The implication … Continued
Socrates, who according to Plato argued around 400BCE that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” might have expected those of us lucky enough to have escaped the restrictions of a subsistence economy (that is, a billion or two people) … Continued
In natural (real) science you can do experiments where you can measure the influence of A on B while holding other things constant. No matter how good a theory is, it’s only taken seriously if there is an experiment that … Continued
A recent speaker on the MFin mentioned, almost in passing, that he didn’t think the Basel III regulatory system would actually be implemented, so flawed was its approach. I thought this sounded a little exaggerated but a recent speech from … Continued
The economics blogosphere and now the mainstream financial press are full of discussion about the flaws in widely cited research done by Professors Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. These authors produced an excellent and path-breaking book This Time Is Different which … Continued