David Kynaston's Till Time's Last Sand reveals how the Bank's relationship with government—from the gold standard to the Crash—have shaped the nation's economy since 1694 David Kynaston is a wonderful social historian, with three massive volumes on post-war Britain and many others to his name. He has been a leading practitioner of “history from below,” … Continue reading “Never explain, never apologise”: a review of David Kynaston’s history of the Bank of England

John Maynard Keynes would have been conflicted by the referendum. Culture pulled him towards Europe; politics and especially the continent’s current austerity economics would have pushed him increasingly away. Churchill talked about the “three majestic circles” of the Commonwealth, the United States and Europe. But over Keynes’s lifetime, the reality was that Britain was firmly … Continue reading What would Keynes think of Brexit?

The early 19th-century founders of the classical school of economics reasoned that the distribution of a society’s income depended crucially on who owned its productive resources. David Ricardo identified three classes of producer, landlords, capitalists and workers. Each of these classes owned a factor of production—land, capital and labour. With land and capital scarce relative … Continue reading Book review: Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty

Any great failure should force us to rethink. The present economic crisis is a great failure of the market system. As George Soros has rightly pointed out, "the salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock like Opec… the crisis was generated by the system itself." … Continue reading Where do we go from here?

I have always said that Keynes would live as long as the world needed him. What the world decided, 30 years ago, was that it no longer needed him. The Keynesian revolution had been reduced to a mechanical system for stabilising economies by means of budget surpluses and deficits—more deficits than surpluses, as it turned … Continue reading Essay: Keynes is Back

Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950) was one of the greatest economists of the 20th century—commonly bracketed with such giants as Keynes, Hayek and Friedman. He is best known for his theory of "creative destruction"—the view that the capitalist system progresses by constantly revolutionising its economic structure. New firms, new products, new technologies continually replace old ones. … Continue reading Portrait: Joseph Schumpeter

When asked about the effects of the French revolution, Zhou Enlai is famously supposed to have said: "It is too early to tell." After only 15 years, post-communist Russia is still near the start of a film which clearly has a long time to run. Official and editorial commentary from the west takes the form … Continue reading Essay: Putin’s Patrimony