Letting The Right Ones In
'How hospitable will Germans be now that travel restrictions on Romanians and Bulgarians have been lifted?'
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
Beware the Sanguine Banker
Iain Martin’s message in his excellent Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy is that a proper sense of fear is good for bankers.
Spending Spree
According to the LSE, the last Labour government’s public spending “worked”. But the researchers came to this conclusion solely from a play on words
Capitalist Capital
Now that London is driving a revival in the UK's economy there will no longer be any mileage in anti-capitalist rhetoric
If Only
The Bank of England has for a long time been hanging policy on one economic indicator and hoping for the best
The Moneybags and the Brains
The Bretton Woods conference of 1944 saw a historic meeting of economists that changed the world forever
Default Lines
An arcane deal for the UK to write off a chunk of Argentina's debt in exchange for an end to squabbling over the Falklands was turned down by the British government. It
ONLINE ONLY: Will Shale Gas Save the British Economy?
A tax windfall from fracking in the North East would merely delay the inevitable day of reckoning for a bloated public sector
Keynesians Fear the US Fiscal Cliff. I don’t
The conventional wisdom on fiscal policy doesn’t add up. A glance at the data and one realises that the media panic is unjustified
How to Exorcise the Ghost of Penury Yet To Come
No pot of money supports the promise of state pensions—the system is unsustainable. A new savings model is needed
Mind the Gap
The gap between big business and small businesses is growing. Unfortunately Vince Cable and Mervyn King are no bridge builders
Not So Austere
The so-called rightward march towards "austerity" has shifted entirely into the territory of the big-spending Left