Francis Coppola

This chart has been fascinating me for ages. It was produced by the Bank of England to illustrate a speech by Andy Haldane. Shock, horror - we have the lowest interest rates for 5,000 years. Even in the Great Depression they were higher than they are now. These are, of course, nominal interest rates. Real interest rates are even lower - though not by much, since inflation is close to zero in all major economies.Note also the divergence of long-term and short-term interest rates. This is...

Economist & Banking Expert Frances Coppola isn't afraid to share her thoughts when it comes to the banking sector. Here she tells invstr's Lea Jakobiak who she thinks is to blame for the financial crisis, why banks need to watch their backs and why Central Banks are doing all the hard work. Watch the video and let us know if you agree. Our new app is available for iOS and Android. Join a community where you can have fun playing the markets, easily learn and share insights in a risk-free...

Economist & Banking Expert Frances Coppola isn't afraid to share her thoughts when it comes to the banking sector. Here she tells invstr's Lea Jakobiak who she thinks is to blame for the financial crisis, why banks need to watch their backs and why Central Banks are doing all the hard work. Watch the video and let us know if you agree. Our new app is available for iOS and Android. Join a community where you can have fun playing the markets, easily learn and share insights in a risk-free...

Well, this is fun. YouGov has asked the public which countries the UK's new trade negotiators (if and when they are recruited) should prioritise in their quest for free trade deals.Unsurprisingly, the US and the EU (considered as a whole trading bloc) came top of the list. But as ever, the devil is in the detail. These charts show the difference between the public's perception of the importance of a country versus its exports and GDP rankings: Now, of course the exports ranking is the...

Are inheritance taxes unfair? Many people think they are. "Why should I be taxed twice on money I've earned during my lifetime?" they say.  This is, of course, a fallacy. Dead people don't pay taxes. Living ones do. So inheritance tax is not double taxation of money the dead person earned while they were still alive. It is taxation of an unearned windfall for the people to whom they leave their assets, usually their children. Other forms of unearned income, such as interest on...

This post has been brewing for a long time. It reflects my attempt to make sense of the growing political confusion and chaos in the world today. William Butler Yeats's poem The Second Coming well expresses what I see: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.  But how have we come to...

A new study shows that the form of shadow "money" used in US prisons is changing. For many years it has been cigarettes (tobacco), and to a lesser extent stamps and envelopes. But now it seems the popularity of these in the prison black economy is declining - in favour of food. Specifically, Ramen noodles, a high-calorie, substantial foodstuff.Without examining the reasons for this change, it would be easy to assume that this is a matter of relative scarcity. Perhaps Ramen noodles are...

Unsurprisingly, on my post "The Art of Economics", which attempted to put the mathematical models beloved of mainstream economics firmly in their place, is a comment defending mainstream mathematical models. Here it is, in part: Secondly, you definitely don't need obscure heterodox models to predict a financial crisis. I've cited it before, but for instance Kiyotaki-Moore basically sketches out how a crisis like this can occur. There are actually plenty of examples of perfectly fine...

Over at Bloomberg View, Noah Smith has a pop at what he calls “heterodox economics”. By this he means the new ideas in economic thinking that have sprung up since the 2008 financial crisis but so far haven’t made it into mainstream economic journals.Noah starts by admitting that mainstream economics abjectly failed to predict the crisis and gave little or no guidance on how to deal with it. Because of this, according to Noah, “many people have looked around for an alternative paradigm --...

I have been following with some amusement the death and resurrection of the Bitfinex exchange. Bitfinex was forced to suspend trading after losing nearly 120,000 BTC in a hacking on 2nd August. But instead of going into liquidation, as we might expect, it reinvented itself - as a bank.Bitfinex had been doing bank-like things ever since its creation in 2012. It accepted deposits from some of its customers, and lent out those deposits to other customers - with the depositors' permission,...