Francis Coppola

In this post, Tom issues a timely reminder that there are much worse threats to our freedom than terrorists. Like Tom, I remember as a child disappearing with my friends all day long, only coming home for lunch and tea - a freedom my own children never had. We seem much more fearful of loss (of all kinds) than our forebears. Perhaps that is because we are much less used to it. - Frances Guest post by Tom Streithorst. For the past four days, the city of Brussels has been on lockdown. The...

In my last post, I warned about "siren voices" calling for tighter monetary policy while the Eurozone economy is stuck in a toxic equilibrium of low growth, zero inflation and intractably high unemployment. Specifically, the so-called "German Council of Economic Experts (GCEE)" has called for the ECB to reduce or unwind QE: ...the European Central Bank should slow down the expansion of its balance sheet or even phase it out earlier than announced. Of course, the GCEE is only concerned...

"The euro area economy is gradually emerging from a deep and protracted downturn. However, despite improvements over the last year, real GDP is still below the level of the first quarter of 2008. The picture is more striking still if one looks at where nominal growth would be now if pre-crisis trends had been maintained." So said Peter Praet, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, in a recent presentation to the FAROS Institutional Investors' Forum.He's not wrong. From his presentation,...

At the Bank of England's Open Forum in London's Guildhall on Wednesday 11th November, an increasingly desperate-sounding Mario Draghi said this: As the majority of money is issued by private banks - bank deposits - there can only be a single currency if there is a single banking system. For money to be truly one, it has to be truly fungible, independent of its form and independent of its function. This is far from being the first time that Signor Draghi has pushed the case for common...

My Forbes post on the threat to democracy in the EU touched a nerve. Well, several nerves, actually. Some people regarded my invocation of the Prague Spring as insulting to the people who suffered under Soviet oppression: others objected to my comparison of the benevolent EU with the evil USSR: and a few complained that I had presented the Syriza government as "martyrs", when they are nothing of the kind. And lots of Portuguese called me out for misrepresenting how their parliamentary...

A panel event run by the Post-Crash Economics Society at the University of Manchester debating the subject "Can People's QE Fix Britain's Economy?".

A panel event run by the Post-Crash Economics Society at the University of Manchester debating the subject "Can People's QE Fix Britain's Economy?".

Did you know that most cars do nothing for 23 hours a day? Yes, they are totally idle. Sleeping safely in their owner's garage, or on his drive, or at her place of work, or in the station car park. Shocking, isn't it? What a terrible waste of assets. We should ensure that all these cars are DRIVEN. All the time. But there is a reason why all these cars are idle. Their owners are busy doing something else. Many people who drive to work, or to the station, do jobs that they love, that...

In Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", the miser par excellence, Ebenezer Scrooge, is frightened by the Christmas ghosts into uncharacteristic acts of generosity. But I have always wondered how long his change of heart lasted. After all, Christmas lasts less than 2 weeks....then the decorations come down, the lights go out and we all start our post-Christmas diets. The abundance of Christmas is followed by the scarcity of Lent. I fear that Scrooge's habitual miserliness would have made a swift...

Yesterday, I attended a panel discussion on the "Sharing Economy" at the Battle of Ideas. Benita Matovska, who describes herself as "chief sharer" of the comparison website Compare & Share, enthused about how the Sharing Economy would build communities, transform capitalism and restore the planet. "It's all about trust," she said.No it isn't. It's all about money.Here's what Matovska herself says on the Compare & Share website. I was trying to book a family holiday in Morocco - when...