Tag Archives: investment

President Juncker's European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) has produced an update on its progress to date. The update is a lovely piece of work, with elegant graphics and breakdowns of projects and investments by country and by sector. Really impressive. Kudos to the content management team.But the content - oh dear, the content. The triumph of image over substance. From the EU-wide State of Play document, here is the total amount invested so far - projects and SME financing - and the...

And particularly in Europe, as this chart shows: The ratings agency Standard & Poors has called for governments everywhere to increase investment spending. It also says they need to improve the efficiency of the spending they are already doing.  Private sector investment spending all over the world fell after the 2008 financial crisis. In Europe, where the crisis started earlier, it started falling in 2007. And it has not recovered. Private sector investors remain risk-averse and...

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. ...

Jeremy Corbyn’s “People’s QE” scheme has been extensively discussed in the media. In fact it has caused something of a storm. The FT’s Chris Giles did an excellent balanced analysis of it, and there have also been useful contributions from – among others - Oxford University’s Simon Wren-Lewis, The Economist’s Buttonwood and FT Alphaville’s Matt Klein. The extent of discussion is far more, in my view, than the scheme deserves. The scheme envisages that the Government, via a public...