Co-authored with Felix Martin The Office for Budget Responsibility forecast in March that the UK economy would grow by 1.7 per cent in 2011, and that the government could meet its target of eliminating the structural deficit by 2014-15. But the economy has underperformed these forecasts by so much that it now seems growth will … Continue reading Urgently needed: a plan C to save Britain’s economy
Category: Journalism
The Wages of Economic Ignorance
Politicians are masters at “passing the buck.” Everything good that happens reflects their exceptional talents and efforts; everything bad is caused by someone or something else. The economy is a classic field for this strategy. Three years after the global economy’s near-collapse, the feeble recovery has already petered out in most developed countries, whose economic … Continue reading The Wages of Economic Ignorance
Recovery before Reform
LONDON – The financial crisis that started in 2007 shrunk the world economy by 6% in two years, doubling unemployment. Its proximate cause was predatory bank lending, so people are naturally angry and want heads and bonuses to roll – a sentiment captured by the current worldwide protests against “Wall Street.” The banks, however, are … Continue reading Recovery before Reform
Recovery before Reform
The financial crisis that started in 2007 shrunk the world economy by 6% in two years, doubling unemployment. Its proximate cause was predatory bank lending, so people are naturally angry and want heads and bonuses to roll – a sentiment captured by the current worldwide protests against “Wall Street.” The banks, however, are not just … Continue reading Recovery before Reform
Coordination vs Disintegration
Since its collapse in the autumn of 2008, the world economy has gone through three phases: a year or more of rapid decline; a bounce back in 2009-2010, which nevertheless did not amount to a full recovery; and a second, though so far much shallower, downturn this year. The resulting damage over the past four … Continue reading Coordination vs Disintegration
The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey Sachs
This is the latest in a spate of books provoked by the world economic crisis and one of the best. Jeffrey Sachs calls himself a "clinical economist". In The End of Poverty he applied his clinician's skills to the distempers of Africa; in this book he turns them to the hubristic and wasteful habits of … Continue reading The Price of Civilization by Jeffrey Sachs
Back from the Brink by Alistair Darling
Alistair Darling's story of his time as Gordon Brown's Chancellor of the Exchequer is intriguingly titled Back from the Brink. There are many brinks in this book - the near-collapse of the British banking system and the world economy, for one. The relationship between Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, and Callum McCarthy, … Continue reading Back from the Brink by Alistair Darling
The Consequences of Angela Merkel
Germany has been leading the opposition in the European Union to any write-down of troubled eurozone members’ sovereign debt. Instead, it has agreed to establish bailout mechanisms such as the European Financial Stability Facility and the European Financial Stabilization Mechanism, which can lend up to €500 billion ($680 billion) combined, with the International Monetary Fund … Continue reading The Consequences of Angela Merkel
The Keynes-Hayek Rematch
The Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, who died in 1992 at the age of 93, once remarked that to have the last word requires only outliving your opponents. His great good fortune was to outlive Keynes by almost 50 years, and thus to claim a posthumous victory over a rival who had savaged him intellectually … Continue reading The Keynes-Hayek Rematch
The Battle of the Bonds
Everyone knows that Greece will default on its external debt. The only question concerns the best way to arrange it so that no one really understands that Greece is actually defaulting. On this topic, there is no shortage of expert plans – among them bond buy-backs, bond swaps, and the creation of Eurobonds, a European … Continue reading The Battle of the Bonds
Robert Skidelsky 