Francis Coppola

The final paragraphs of Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras's op-ed in Le Monde read thus:Europe, therefore, is at a crossroads. Following the serious concessions made by the Greek government, the decision is now not in the hands of the institutions, which in any case – with the exception of the European Commission- are not elected and are not accountable to the people, but rather in the hands of Europe’s leaders.Which strategy will prevail? The one that calls for a Europe of...

This, my third post on Latvia, looks at its recovery from the 2008-9 recession.Latvia is often held up as the "poster child" for harsh austerity measures as the means of returning to strong economic growth. In order to hold its currency peg to the Euro, it embarked on a brutal front-loaded fiscal consolidation in 2009, sacking public sector workers, slashing public sector salaries, cutting benefits and raising taxes. Between 2010 and 2013 it cut its fiscal deficit from 10% of GDP to a...

This week saw the deaths of the great mathematician John Nash and his wife Alicia in a car crash and the suicide of terminally-ill businessman Jeffrey Spector in Switzerland with the help of Dignitas. This post is written in their memory, and also in memory of my friends and musical colleagues Gavin Williams, who died last week, and Lindsay Purcell, who died at the beginning of April. May they rest in peace. This post is unashamedly long. After all, death is forever. From time...

At the end of my previous post, I posed the question: why did Latvia experience the deepest recession in the world in 2008-9?The first puzzle is that Latvia's banks were in no worse shape than anyone else's and better than some. Among small countries, Iceland, Ireland and (in 2013) Cyprus all experienced bigger banking collapses relative to the size of their economies than Latvia. Larger countries did too, notably Germany and the UK, both of which suffered widespread damage across their large...

This is not what you think it is. And it is not what I intended to write about, either. I was going to write about Latvia as it is now, after the deepest recession in the world in 2008-9 and an excruciatingly painful front-loaded fiscal consolidation. Has it really recovered, or is it just marking time?But in looking at Latvia now, I find myself drawn to its history. Latvia's unusual response to the kicking it got in 2008 was because of its history. It had a deep recession 1991-3 and a severe...

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism takes issue with me over my attempt to derail the "Banking should be boring" bandwagon. She claims that new research by the IMF proves that banking should indeed be boring: The IMF paper is generally in line with the argument that banking should be boring, meaning that complexity, opacity, and leverage typically work far more for the benefit of the financier and at the expense of customers and society at large. Frances Coppola tries to turn that argument on its...

W.H. Auden’s epic poem “The Age of Anxiety”, written during the dark fragmentation of the Second World War II, was widely acclaimed as defining the spirit of our time. Few claim to have read it, but everyone knows the title: as Daniel Smith put it in an op-ed in the New York Times, “as a sticker on the bumper of the Western world, “the age of anxiety” has been ubiquitous for more than six decades now.” Anxiety – and its cousins introspection and depression – is widespread, disrupting...

No, says The Times' David Smith. He says that the notion that there was a pause in austerity is an "austerity myth".He points to this chart from the Office for Budget Responsibility that shows fiscal consolidation as a percentage of GDP (relative to the 2008 Budget) continuing on throughout 2013 and 2014 and 2015:But the OBR's chart doesn't actually show what I would define as austerity. It shows the size of the government budget as a percentage of GDP relative to...

Since the financial crisis, some people have argued that “Banking should be boring”. The idea is that banking should be limited to simple deposit-taking, lending and payments services. We don’t need the trappings of modern investment banking: structured lending schemes, derivative products, complex risk metrics, synthetics and the like. They may be fun to create, and highly lucrative to trade, but they aren’t socially useful. Let’s get back to basics. All we need is little banks, simple...

My latest post at Pieria looks at the role of design in a time of change. Using mirrors and glass as metaphors, it maps the transformation of the "spirit of the age" from anxiety to empathy as the world heals from the trauma of the twentieth century's three Great Wars (yes, you read that correctly). And although it is optimistic about the new opportunities for collaboration and sharing that technology creates, it asks whether replacing introspection with connection and opacity with...