Book Review, Mr Keynes’ Revolution: A Novel, E. J. Barnes, 2020, Greyfire publishing.
In Mr Keynes’ Revolution, Emma Barnes makes Keynes the subject of a novel, and does so brilliantly. I cannot recommend the book highly enough to anyone interested in Keynes and wanting to get a sense of what he – and his economics – is about.
I am no literary critic, but found the story-telling dramatic, highly engaging and touching. Above all (for me) Barnes has a powerful and sophisticated sense of the political and social backdrop against which Keynes began to formulate his economics, and portrays (or imagines) very effectively establishment efforts to rein him in.
Covering seven years from the end of the First World War, the central economic theme is Britain’s return to the gold standard. Great that

Book Review, Mr Keynes’ Revolution: A Novel, E. J. Barnes, 2020, Greyfire publishing.In Mr Keynes’ Revolution, Emma Barnes makes Keynes the subject of a novel, and does so brilliantly. I cannot recommend the book highly enough to anyone interested in Keynes and wanting to get a sense of what he – and his economics – is about.I am no literary critic, but found the story-telling dramatic, highly engaging and touching. Above all (for me) Barnes has a powerful and sophisticated sense of the political and social backdrop against which Keynes began to formulate his economics, and portrays (or imagines) very effectively establishment efforts to rein him in.Covering seven years from the end of the First World War, the central economic theme is Britain’s return to the gold standard. Great that

Book Review, Mr Keynes’ Revolution: A Novel, E. J. Barnes, 2020, Greyfire publishing.In Mr Keynes’ Revolution, Emma Barnes makes Keynes the subject of a novel, and does so brilliantly. I cannot recommend the book highly enough to anyone interested in Keynes and wanting to get a sense of what he – and his economics – is about.I am no literary critic, but found the story-telling dramatic, highly engaging and touching. Above all (for me) Barnes has a powerful and sophisticated sense of the political and social backdrop against which Keynes began to formulate his economics, and portrays (or imagines) very effectively establishment efforts to rein him in.Covering seven years from the end of the First World War, the central economic theme is Britain’s return to the gold standard. Great that

Even while the economy is recast for today’s pandemic on the back of the dismal failures of the past decade, austerity is already rearing its ugly head.
At one level there must be politics here. The public must not be allowed to think that socialising the economy to meet a pandemic means the economy might be socialised when the pandemic is over. Likewise, obsessing about excessive debt means the greatly more pressing and more dangerous reality of deficient expenditure is side-lined.
But it’s not just politics.  Economics is also at play. For the economics of austerity is still dominant, not yet defeated.
Economists are stuck on symptoms, rather than cause.
Ten years ago, ‘The Economic Consequence of Mr Osborne’ systematically catalogued all past failures of austerity. Earlier this year

“I say that if captains of industry cannot organise their concerns so as to give Labour a living wage, then they should resign from their captaincy of industry” – Ernest Bevin, February 1920One hundred years ago this month, a public inquiry held at the Royal Courts of Justice in London marked a significant change in industrial relations and fostered a wider sympathy for the conditions of working people. Over two weeks, the ‘Inquiry into Wages Rates and Conditions of Men Engaged in Dock and Waterside Labour’, chaired by the judge Lord Shaw, laid bare the “great human tragedy of men and women fighting year in and year out against the terrible

After the BRICs came the MINTs – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey.In a series of January 2014 BBC programmes, Jim O’Neill – then the Goldman Sachs economist who had coined the term BRICs – celebrated the new acronym. On a blog under the title ‘The Mint countries: Next economic giants?’ he raved about the potential of his new discoveries:I returned from my travels thinking it won’t be so difficult for Nigeria and Turkey to positively surprise people, as many put far too much weight on the negative issues that are well-known – crime and corruption in Nigeria, for example, or heavy-handed government in Turkey.In Turkey,

Mountains of private debt?  Image with acknowledgment to Wikimedia

“Countries that underwent sharp credit booms have often experienced a crisis” (Bank of England, 2018, Chart A.28 p. 22)For policymakers, the importance of private debt was the key take home from the financial crisis. Though why it constituted new learning is a non-trivial question, given Irving Fisher’s 1933 debt deflation account of the Great Depression. [1]Private debt is also a central theme in the Bank of England’s latest commentary around financial stability, with particular emphasis on the position in China and the US.But there

“Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money”Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inaugural address, 4 March 19331.     Introduction and overviewTen years ago the bursting of private debt ‘bubbles’ – most obviously in the US, UK and on the periphery of the EU – woke policymakers to the importance of balance sheet dynamics. Today, commentary by international organisations has ongoing rises in private debt as a key risk to global outcomes.New and extensive data collection and reporting allows commentators to examine the position more closely, with the latest IMF ‘global debt database’ offering both

Over the past decade in advanced western economies, the rate of improvement in prosperity has ground to the lowest point of the post-war period.  Stagnation is now the norm across the majority of the globe, and even in Asia more substantial gains are slowing.This position is illustrated by the comprehensive productivity statistics over time and space on the charts below (for source and details of calculations see endnote [1]).After a more detailed discussion of outcomes, it is argued in this article that productivity has been the result of aggregate demand rather than supply conditions. And that the strength of demand