It’s the mission of the University of Cambridge to be globally excellent in research and education. On the whole we don’t take much notice of rankings, though it is obviously nice that Cambridge is usually at or near the top … Continued
There is a growing view that if the Eurozone governments could come up with a large enough financial bazooka, it would stop the markets in their tracks and restore confidence. That view is nicely punctured by Simon Johnson (former Chief … Continued
British people have been known to play a rather childishly condescending game called “name five famous Belgians”. Part of the problem is some people thought to be French turn out to be Belgians in fact (such as TinTin creator Hergé). … Continued
In my Financial Institutions and Products course on the MFin, I give a brief introduction to national accounts and a way of thinking about macroeconomics that is relatively simple but allows us to explain a lot. It draws on the … Continued
It’s not something readily spoken of, but one reason for doing and MBA (or MFin perhaps) is to find a wife or husband. Very few people will own up to this, though I have had someone personally tell me this … Continued
President of the EU Commission, José Manuel Barroso, recently proposed a “Tobin tax” for the EU. Named after the brilliant economist James Tobin, this tax is on transactions in financial markets. Its deceptive attraction is that it is levied at … Continued
The sacking of Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin yesterday might not seem very important, just another casualty of Kremlin politics. But the Peterson Institute of International Economics offers an insightful and rather depressing account of how this means Putin is … Continued
An excellent column by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times is reduced to its essentials by Paul Krugman. And yes, I’m more pessimistic than when I wrote about the Euro problems before.
A long standing theme in macroeconomic policy is the question, when is it best for policy makers to be tied to a rule and when should they have freedom to decide what to do (“discretion”). It’s easiest to see why … Continued
The ever excellent Peterson Institute for International Economics has a blog post today on the solution to the USA’s crumbling transport infrastructure, namely tolls. Resistance to raising taxes makes it all but impossible for the federal or state governments to … Continued
After the embarrassment created by former IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn you might expect his successor to be particularly careful about her words in the area of male-female attraction. But according to a blog at the journal Foreign Policy, you … Continued
It’s nice to see the Chinese government making constructive noises about helping the Eurozone and Italy in particular, if only because I speculated about Beijing coming to the rescue earlier this year in class. I also put the idea to … Continued
I wasn’t the only one to have a go at Jamie Dimon (see this post from June). Paul Krugman, a rather more distinguished blogger than me, has been trying to poke fun at him too. But Dimon’s latest outburst takes … Continued
Since I last blogged back in June, the flow of bad economic and financial news has turned into a torrent. Banks have shed jobs, markets have fallen, confidence in governments is even lower than before, the ECB has acrimoniously lost … Continued
MFins have many hidden talents. Some of them formed a band this year and were kind/foolish enough to invite me to play along with them on a couple of songs after a dinner at Churchill College. On this rather hazy … Continued