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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

Goldilocks and the Griffin

The UK is forcing universal banks like HSBC to ring-fence their retail operations from their global and investment banking businesses – a sort of watered-down Glass-Steagall arrangement. The ring-fence will come into force in 2019, and banks are currently working out how to implement it. HSBC is creating a completely separate UK retail entity with its own capital, management and head office. As part of this process, it conducted a review of possible locations for the unit's new head...

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Oh dear, Professor Sinn……

Hans Werner Sinn has apost on Project Syndicate which purports to explain why the plans of Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis are much cleverer than anyone has realised. I don’t disagree that Mr. Varoufakis’s plans are clever: indeed I have written several posts on Forbes explaining just how clever they are. But Professor Sinn’s explanation, sadly, is very wide of the mark. Here is Professor Sinn’s description of Mr. Varofakis’s strategy: Plan B comprises two key elements. First, there...

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An anthem for Europe

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...

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How do you say "dead cat" in Latvian?

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...

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Reflections on death and immortality

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...

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Property, inequality and financial crises

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...

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The Latvian financial crisis

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...

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Redefining retail banking

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...

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Mirrors and Glass: the role of design in a time of change

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...

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Did Osborne Pause Austerity in 2013?

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...

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