debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The appointment of Mark Carney as next Governor of the Bank of England has been greeted with universal acclaim. In the House of Commons Ed Balls was quick to congratulate Chancellor George Osborne on his choice, and on the evening TV news both former Chancellor Alistair Darling and self-styled monetary maverick David Blanchflower were of [...]
It is generally agreed that the crisis of 2008-2009 was caused by excessive bank lending, and that the failure to recover adequately from it stems from banks’ refusal to lend, owing to their “broken” balance sheets. A typical story, much favored by followers of Friedrich von Hayek and the Austrian School of economics, goes like [...]
The ECB may well be the only institution capable of saving the euro area. Arguably only it now has the financial fire power and the decision-making nimbleness to stem the crisis. As I and others have long argued, if it declared its willingness to act as lender of last resort to endangered sovereigns – whether [...]
However circumspect Mervyn King may have been about raising interest rates in the Bank of England’s (BoE) quarterly inflation report issued in February, it is clear that the City wants him to do so. Indeed, judging from the fact that 12-month interest rate futures are now 1.4%, it is generally thought that there will be [...]
The ONS figures were dreadful: it’s not just that the UK’s growth performance in Q4/2010 was seriously negative and this is bound to have a spill-over effect in 2011. Add the January rise in VAT and mounting pressure on the Bank of England to raise interest rates, and things on this side of the Channel [...]
As an addendum to the previous post, it is often argued that central banks are all the same, and that behind apparently different mandates they all follow the same model. This is wrong. Adam Posen, a member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee has just given a speech in which he looks at [...]
In early 2009, Paul Krugman gave a series of lectures at the London School of Economics on the global economic crisis in which he warned about the danger of a ‘perfect storm’ hitting the economy. The scenario he sketched was that of a fragile recovery in 2010-11 being hit by an inflationary spike, leading to [...]
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