Tag Archives: UK

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...

The direct China-Britain freight train is likely to shake up traditional trade patterns as speed and reliability are the key in modern supply, said Nichola Silveira, general manager of Logistics of DP World London Gateway. The first China-bound freight train carrying British products left DP World London Gateway terminal on April 10 and arrived at eastern China's Yiwu city known as China's "world supermarket" after a 19-day journey. "This was the pilot run and now we are working to...

The first trade war of the Trump administration is with — Canada! Not counting sanctions as trade war, of course. Sanctions are just war by non-military means. Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, told President Donald Trump on Wednesday he would block his country’s armed forces from buying Boeing aircraft if the US presses ahead with plans to slap import tariffs of 300 percent on Bombardier aeroplanes. The issue is threatening to ignite a trade war between the US, Canada and the...

On the evening of Friday, September 22nd, the credit ratings agency Moody's downgraded the UK's credit rating. Admittedly, it was only by one notch. But coming as it did hard on the heels of Theresa May's grand speechin Florence, it was a shattering blow.  Credit ratings agencies lost much of their lustre in the financial crisis of 2008, when they were revealed to have been complicit in the mispricing of complex financial derivatives – the “toxic waste” that brought down some of the...

The Great Repeal Bill grants May’s ministers the power to rewrite reams of British law without democratic oversight. Not only will there be no longer an equivalent to the Francovich ruling. The Great Repeal Bill will also diminish human, civic, social and environmental rights. It will considerably strengthen the position of the executive. A British Bill of Rights and “free” trade deals will replace the Human Rights Act and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Agreements will...

Professor Bill Mitchell – a major proponent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) – will attend a Labour Conference fringe event this September, it’s a rare opportunity progressives must seize.… Through the mass misinformation that is the neoliberal doctrine, the elites created a set of economic rules which presents them and only them as the indispensable saviours of society, and thus the only entity that must directly benefit from economic policy. They then dressed this fantasy as common sense,...

On 30th June 2016, just one week after the EU Referendum, I wrote this:It has swiftly become clear, if it were not already so, that neither the government nor the leaders of the Brexit campaigns had anything resembling a plan for what to do if the people voted in favour of leaving the EU.  As Mark Carney rather mordantly put it in his speech...

The Taylor “Review of Modern Working Practices”, published on Tuesday, is a fundamentally complacent document:“National labour markets have strengths and weaknesses and involve trade-offs between different goals but the British way is rightly seen internationally as largely successful.”True, the report expresses a number of reasonable aspirations and contains a number of sensible but gentle proposals, but it fails to come up with any strong proposals for dealing with the real...

Wagon of Fools by Hendrik Gerritsz Pot, 1637,  representing the Dutch Tulip Mania and the quest for riches... Image with acknowledgment to Wikipedia Recently, this author discussed the rapid increase in auto-finance delinquencies that need to be seen as just one component of a growing bubble. The...

Britain's public debt has risen inexorably since the Great Financial Crisis. It has done so despite (or because of) austerity, spending cuts that butchered the public sector and local government services, and led amongst other tragedies, to the Grenfell Tower inferno. And because of the very determined efforts of both Labour,...