Ian Goldin is Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Oxford. He recently wrote an article in the Financial Times in which he gives a brief description of how technology is replacing human labour, making it harder for people to earn a living from paid employment. He then goes on to list five…
“Zimbabwe.” That’s the favourite one. Sometimes backed up with “The Weimar Republic.” Galloping inflation. That’s what you get when the government prints money. Swiftly followed by economic collapse. Guaranteed. Anyone with half a brain knows that. When armchair economists are finally forced to admit that there is a magic money tree, which government can use to…
I’m struggling to decide which of the Labour Party’s factions makes me more angry. The ship of state is wallowing adrift in uncertain seas. Captain Cameron has fainted from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot and his officers have scuttled off to hide in the heads hoping that someone else will clean up the…
John Mason MSP is a former accountant who is the Deputy Convener of the Scottish Parliament’s Finance Committee. Last month he was the focus of a lengthy conversation on twitter after stating that the “UK deficit (is) £1.5 trillion”. For those of you with time to squander the entire twitter exchange can be found here: https://twitter.com/JohnMasonMSP/status/703699151461203968…
John McDonnell, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote an article for the Independent last weekend in which he pointed out the folly and failure of George Osborne’s austerity fetish, and told us about the new economic strategy that the Labour Party is currently devising as an alternative to the Tory government’s slash and burn…
Here’s a little film that gets to the bottom of the money problem.
For most of the last 30 years it looked like socialism had been soundly beaten by its old adversary, capitalism. From the mid 1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s second government defeated Britain’s striking coal miners, until around 2009 when the extent of the banking crisis had sunk in, free-market capitalism was the only game in town.…
Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected leap to the front of the Labour Party leadership race has inadvertently created a modern miracle: it has united every organ of the mainstream media from the Guardian to the Telegraph, and every politician to the right of Dennis Skinner. They all agree that his plans for the economy are bonkers. If…
Last month’s general election for the UK parliament provided a harsh reminder to some political parties that electoral success is all about telling a good story. The narrative has to be one that the electorate wants to believe or, at the very least, one that appeals to their common sense. The Scottish National Party won…
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21631140-interest-rates-turn-negative-some-worse-nothing?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/worsethannothing : The Economist reporting that a German bank is to apply a negative interest rate to personal accounts with balances of more than 500,000 euros in an attempt to get people to do something productive with their spare money. I can’t see how negative interest can work when it’s applied by only one bank…
Views From The Boatshed 