Tag Archives: UK

The Carillion whitewash has begun. Carillion's interim CEO, Keith Cochrane, is spinning the line that had banks not pulled funding, its collapse could have been averted. And the Financial Times has released details of a letter Carillion sent to the Government at the beginning of January, in which it asked for short-term advances to tide it over while it underwent restructuring. Labour MP Pat McFadden has written to the Treasury Secretary asking whether it would have been more...

The Financial Times questioned economists for its annual publication of economic forecasts: “With unemployment at a 40-year low, how much of a pay rise will British workers get in 2018?” (See here: https://www.ft.com/content/98ce5e72-ebd9-11e7-bd17-521324c81e23)  PRIME economists responded thus:The fall in real wages while employment has fallen and employment has risen is a consequence of sustained hyper-globalisation policy in which much of the labour force is now obliged to...

PRIME (Policy Research in Macroeconomics) economists were asked by the FT “How fast do you think the UK economy will grow in 2018 and how will this compare to other countries?” (See here: https://www.ft.com/content/ceb165ee-ebb5-11e7-bd17-521324c81e23)We replied as follows:The end of 2017 witnessed, in our view, the top of the global asset bubble. Rupert Murdoch’s decision to dispose of 21st Century Fox was a clear indication that the bubble had peaked. Bitcoin’s stratospheric...

Yesterday I spoke to a group of important economists about my book The Production of Money - but omitted to make one important point. So am making it here. Savings are not needed for investment. Ever. There is absolutely no need for example, for the Chancellor to rattle the tax collection box, or cut government spending - to...

What Crisis?For the last several years the media have carried reports of a crisis of low productivity plaguing the British economy, both in terms of level and rate of change.  Almost two years ago, PRIME's Jeremy Smith provided what I considered the definitive refutation of the existence of such a crisis.  But, far from ending, the “crisis” discussion has gathered pace to become a recurrent media theme.A presentation of trends in UK productivity appeared in the Civil Service...

“Will you tell me how long you have loved him?” asks Jane Bennet, on receiving the astonishing news that her sister Elizabeth is to marry Darcy, the rich aristocrat she used to hate. “It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began,” replies Elizabeth. “But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” This is from the end of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Austen is lampooning the British 19th century marriage market, in which...

Within hours of becoming Prime Minister last year, Theresa May made an important economic statement. She put ‘Industrial Strategy’ in the title of the Department for Business. No longer, she was declaring, would a Conservative administration regard active government intervention in the economy as anathema. The economy was too weak for such a luxury. Henceforth the state would play a leading role in getting markets and private enterprise to work better. In most developed...

Make no mistake, yesterday’s increase in interest rates was a big deal. Painful as it might be for a good share of the population, the real point is that the Bank is signalling the end of a particular phase of monetary policy. Since 2010 the counterpart to self-defeating austerity policies has been expansionary monetary policies. These have inflated assets - enriching the already-rich, while failing to stimulate wider economic recovery. Yesterday the Bank of England’s Monetary...

Image with acknowledgement to Google Search Anyone familiar with the austerity obsession of EU leaders will know that the boundary between fiscal virtue and profligate sin lies at minus 3%.  A budget balance below the ominous minus 3 sends the offending government to the fiscal headmasters of the European...

As you would hope, there was a lot of new economic thinking at the recent (21-23 October) Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) conference in Edinburgh. Economists from across the world presented stimulating papers on issues ranging from secular stagnation to imperfect knowledge, the dual economy to macroeconomics and gender. There were...