Tag Archives: inflation

When a former Bank of England deputy governor gives a presentation entitled "Are Low Interest Rates Natural?" to a extraordinarily high-powered audience of academics and monetary policymakers, you can bet he will come up with some great charts. Charlie Bean's historical analysis of long-term real and nominal yields in the UK is amazing: It is very evident that for most of the last 200 years, nominal and real consol yields have been pretty much pinned together. Charlie said that the gold...

I have repeatedly said that I do not support Jeremy Corbyn's "People's QE". But there seems to be considerable confusion about what exactly I oppose. And that is for one simple reason: the deliberate conflation of government investment spending and QE by the architect of this scheme. PQE is composed of two separate and distinct strands: 1. Government spending to finance investment in infrastructure, innovation, R&D and housing 2. Bank of England purchases of government bonds. ...

Guest post by Tom StreithorstVladimir Illych Lenin may well be the most destructive political theorist of the 20th century.  His glorification of a conspiratorial party as agent of a glorious future legitimised mass murder from Bolshevik Russia to Nazi Germany to Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.  Nonetheless, he did invent an analytical tool political scientists and economists should use more often: “Kto Kovo”, or “who beats whom”.  In examining any policy, Lenin suggests the first...

We show the two phases or "two innings" of Swiss franc appreciation: The risk aversion game and the inflation game. With the weakening of emerging markets and the strengthening of the United States in 2013/2014, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) had won the first battle in the war against financial market, the "risk aversion game", the first inning in two-part match. Risk aversion is lower because the United States recovered with weaker oil prices. The "inflation game" started earlier than we...

Interest rates are the price of credit. They are the price of access to capital. Now, it is obvious that pricing credit is not tyrannical in and of itself. Interest compensates a lender for default risk and the risk of inflation eroding the purchasing power of the money that they lend. The tyranny I am getting at is subtle. It is the tyranny that Keynes pointed to when he proposed a euthanasia of the rentier. Keynes proposed that low interest rates would: mean the euthanasia of the rentier,...