Robert Skidelsky

  LONDON – Fiscal policy is edging back into fashion, after years, if not decades, in purdah. The reason is simple: the incomplete recovery from the global crash of 2008. Europe is the worst off in this regard: its GDP has hardly grown in the last four years, and GDP per capita is still less than it was in 2007. Moreover, growth forecasts are gloomy. In July, the European Central Bank published a report suggesting that the negative output gap in the eurozone was 6%, four percentage...

“Nem tudo o que brilha é ouro” O Mercador de Veneza Estamos condenados a viver em crise? Ricardo Paes Mamede, Robert Skidelsky, Teodora Cardoso. Moderação: Graça Franco. Repetimos diariamente que vivemos em crise – mas em que época o mundo viveu arredado da ideia e da experiência da crise? A crise será consubstancial à natureza humana? A actual crise económica não decorrerá de uma crise de valores – da quebra do valor da confiança e do conceito de bem comum que, segundo os primeiros...

'Austerity in times of crisis: 1929 vs 2008' ISIGrowth CONFERENCE – Europe beyond austerity: a discussion on how to restore innovation-fuelled growth. Brussels, 1-2 June 2016

  Most people are more worried by government debt than about taxation. “But it’s trillions” a friend of mine recently expostulated about the United Kingdom’s national debt. He exaggerated a bit: it is £1.7 trillion. But one website features a clock showing the debt growing at a rate of £5,170 per second. Although the tax take is far less, the UK government still collected a hefty £533.7 billion in taxes in the last fiscal year. The tax base grows by the second, too, but no clock shows...

Theresa May, the UK prime minister, has all but repudiated the economic policies of the previous chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne. She has promised an “industrial strategy to get the whole economy moving”. What form should a renovated economic strategy take? The immediate problem to overcome is the uncertainty engendered by the Brexit vote. What weapons exist to fight it? Mr Osborne’s target of eliminating the budget deficit by 2019-20 has already been abandoned, but adding...

LONDON – The horrendous attack by a French-Tunisian man on a crowd in Nice celebrating Bastille Day, which killed 84 and injured hundreds more, will give National Front leader Marine Le Pen a massive boost in next spring’s presidential election. It doesn’t matter whether the murderer, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, had any links to radical Islamism. Throughout the Western world, a toxic mix of physical, economic, and cultural insecurity has been fueling anti-immigration sentiment and politics...

Lord Robert Skidelsky, author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy in the University of Warwick and a big supporter of the Rethinking Economics movement. For the Global Action Day of the International Student Initiative for Pluralism in Economics (ISIPE), we have worked with Leeds University Business School (LUBS) to arrange a talk with Lord Skidelsky about improving the way economics is taught and learnt. Filmed in Leeds, UK, 2016

A brief interview with Lord Robert Skidelsky. Filmed in Leeds, UK, 2016.

LONDON – Britain isn’t the only country holding a referendum this month. On June 5, Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected, by 77% to 23%, the proposition that every citizen should be guaranteed an unconditional basic income (UBI). But that lopsided outcome doesn’t mean the issue is going away anytime soon.Indeed, the idea of a UBI has made recurrent appearances in history – starting with Tom Paine in the eighteenth century. This time, though, it is likely to have greater staying power, as the...

Negative interest rates are simply the latest fruitless effort since the 2008 global financial crisis to revive economies by monetary measures. When cutting interest rates to historically low levels failed to revive growth, central banks took to so-called quantitative easing: injecting liquidity into economies by buying long-term government and other bonds. It did some good, but mostly the sellers sat on the cash instead of spending or investing it.Enter negative interest-rate policy. The...