Francis Coppola

Quote by Frances Coppola. Source : http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/finland-universal-basic-income-uk-needs-to-start-testing-it-a7871596.html Help UBIVisuals contribute to the cause. #BasicIncome Patreon.com/UBIVisuals

Quote by Frances Coppola. Source : http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/finland-universal-basic-income-uk-needs-to-start-testing-it-a7871596.html Help UBIVisuals contribute to the cause. #BasicIncome Patreon.com/UBIVisuals

In the past few days, I have read three pieces from Economists for Brexit - now renamed "Economists for Free Trade" - extolling the virtues of "hard" (or "clean") Brexit and calling for the UK to drop all external tariffs to zero unilaterally after Brexit. Two are written by professors of finance (Kent Matthews and Kevin Dowd). The third is from the veteran economist Patrick Minford.All three of these pieces wax lyrical about the benefits to GDP and welfare from unilaterally reducing...

“What do they teach them at these schools?” wondered the Professor in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Professor, of course, was concerned about logic. But I wonder too - not about logic, but about maths. Especially among journalists writing about life expectancy and other long-term trends.Here is the FT proclaiming "Average life expectancy falls". This is the headline for a chirpy piece about how reduced life expectancy could make things easier for pension funds...

I wrote a piece on Forbes recently in which I described a bimetallic system of coinage and suggested how such a system might work - or rather, fail to work - for Bitcoin. These are the relevant paragraphs: In a bimetallic system, there are effectively two currencies which are linked by a fixed exchange rate set by fiat. At the end of the 19th century - the time of Bryan's speech - Britain's copper penny was worth 1/144 of one pound. Other denominations of coin were created by...

Here is a very familiar financial bubble, in pictorial form: And this is what it looks like, charted: In those days, of course, tulips at least had to be able to flower. But things have changed since then.There are three key stages in the lifecycle of a financial bubble:The "Free Lunch" period. A long, slow buildup of price distortion, during which investors convince themselves that rising prices are entirely justified by fundamentals, even though it is apparent to (rational) observers...

Ten years ago today, Chuck Prince, then chief executive of Citigroup, dismissed fears of a financial crisis. “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated," he said in an interview with the Financial Times in Japan. "But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing". He wasn't dancing for long. Less than a month later, the first bank failed. Over the weekend of 27th-29th July, IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG, one of...

A year ago, I attempted to look beyond the shock of the Brexit vote and its associated economic disruption, and see into the distant future. I saw a completely different political paradigm, though I could not discern its shape. And I saw a possibility that, like Hong Kong in 1997, the fears of economic disaster would prove baseless, and Britain would have a bright future, though one which I could not imagine. I called on everyone to try to make Brexit work: Not for a long time has the...

Rather to my surprise, the Co-Op Bank has had a reprieve - well, perhaps more like a stay of execution. Even more surprisingly, this has come from what many would regard as a most unlikely source. The American hedge funds that rescued the bank back in 2014 are about to rescue it again, with a little help from their friends and relatives. "Vulture funds" are behaving most unlike vultures.Four months ago, the Co-Op Bank put itself up for sale. Unable to comply with the capital plan agreed...

Last Thursday's election was a shock. It was appalling for the Tories, extraordinarily encouraging for Labour and something of a "meh" for the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. And it was dreadful for nationalist parties. UKIP was completely wiped out, ending up with no seats at Westminster and a hugely reduced share of the poll. The SNP lost seats, and even Plaid Cymru did less well than it had hoped. Nationalism, it seems, is dying down. Well, in the UK, anyway.Faced with a disastrous...