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The author Frances Coppola
Frances Coppola
I’m Frances Coppola, writer, singer and twitterer extraordinaire. I am politically non-aligned and economically neutral (I do not regard myself as “belonging” to any particular school of economics). I do not give investment advice and I have no investments.Coppola Comment is my main blog. I am also the author of the Singing is Easy blog, where I write about singing, teaching and muscial expression, and Still Life With Paradox, which contains personal reflections on life, faith and morality.

Francis Coppola

Velocity Matters

An accounting identity does not indicate the direction of causation. Not ever. I’ve been caught out on this a few times myself, usually when I am trying to deduce something useful from national accounting equations. But I’m merely a writer. People actually involved in the formulation of policy should know better. Here’s an attempt by people who should know better to try to infer the direction of causation from an identity. On the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s blog site is this post by Yi...

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Rachel Oliver (Positive Money) and Frances Coppola TSB Internet Banking Radio 5 Interview

http://www.positivemoney.org/ Rachel Oliver (Positive Money) calls into a Radio 5 Live interview with Frances Coppola and more to comment on the TSB Internet Banking disruptions, and criticises the power the Big Banks still have, ten years after the financial crash. -------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to Positive Money UK's videos: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=PositiveMoneyUK Like us on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/PositiveMoney Follow us on Twitter...

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Rachel Oliver (Positive Money) and Frances Coppola TSB Internet Banking Radio 5 Interview

http://www.positivemoney.org/ Rachel Oliver (Positive Money) calls into a Radio 5 Live interview with Frances Coppola and more to comment on the TSB Internet Banking disruptions, and criticises the power the Big Banks still have, ten years after the financial crash. -------------------------- SUBSCRIBE to Positive Money UK's videos: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=PositiveMoneyUK Like us on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/PositiveMoney Follow us on Twitter...

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Arithmetic for Austrians

This piece grew from a number of conversations with people of Austrian economic persuasion, mostly Bitcoiners and goldbugs (which these days seem mysteriously to have converged). I thought of calling this "Monetarism for goldbugs", but decided to preserve the mathematical slant of the previous pieces in this series. But it's monetary arithmetic, of course. And as Austrians tend to obsess about "sound money", it is specifically sound monetary arithmetic. (Note: Someone has pointed out on...

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The Bitcoin Standard – a critical review

For over a century now, the world has lacked a genuinely international means of payment. This is partly due to decisions made at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, when the US dollar was adopted as the principal international settlement currency, rather than John Maynard Keynes's suggestion of an independent global currency that he called "bancor". Although the Bretton Woods gold-backed structure ended in 1971, the US dollar became ever more dominant. In 2008, the dollar's global reach...

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The EU is not a bastion of protectionism

Jamie Powell at FT Alphaville has debunked the USA's claim to be the least protectionist trade area in the world. With the help of a couple of useful charts, he shows that it comes in a modest ninth on the list in trade-weighted terms. Go Jamie. The "victim America" narrative really needs to be stamped on, hard. America's trade deficit is not caused by mercantilist trade policies in other countries, it is an inevitable consequence of the dominance of the dollar - and is thus a measure of...

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The sad story of Maplin Electronics

Last week saw two high-profile corporate failures in the UK. Toys R Us finally went into administration after a stay of execution over Christmas. And private equity firm Rutland Partners pulled the plug on geeky electronics retailer Maplin. Total job losses from both failures amount to something in the region of 5,000 across the whole of the UK. No-one was particularly surprised by the failure of Toys R Us. The company had proved slow to respond to the rise of online shopping and the...

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An Alternative Brexit Polemic

You would think, wouldn't you, that an "Alternative Brexit Economic Analysis" by four highly experienced and qualified economists would be a rigorous exercise in economic forecasting, supported by excellent econometrics and with care taken to avoid confirmation and selection bias?  A new paper from the Brexit-supporting thinktank Economists for Free Trade critiques the Government's recent forecast that Brexit would cause a GDP loss of between 2 and 8 percent over 15 years, with the...

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The misery of Mitie

The failure of Carillion has brought to light widespread moral hazard in the outsourcing sector. For years, companies that deliver crucial public services relied on expectation of government support to keep their borrowing costs low and enable them to please shareholders by giving dividends they couldn't afford. They, and the banks and investors that funded them, assumed they were too important to fail. So when Carillion was on the brink of failure, RBS tightened the screws, clearly...

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Clearing out Carillion’s cupboards

Those excellent researchers at the House of Commons Library have produced a briefing paper on the Carillion collapse. It is clear, succinct and well-researched. And extremely grim.The researchers seem to have gone back through the reports & accounts to about 2009. And they conclude that Carillion was a basket case not just in the last year of its life, but from about 2011 onwards. I've now done the same exercise, and I agree with them. Carillion's cupboards were virtually bare, and the...

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