Author Archives: admin

I can’t say how I’d vote “if I were a Scot”. If I were a Scot, I wouldn’t be me. But I can tell you my opinion: Yes; for independence. Better still, I can address the currency question.On the politics, George Mombiot makes the case in I’d vote yes to rid Scotland of its feudal landowners and Scots voting no to independence would […]

Click here for the PDF of slides of my talk on the Euro-area crisis and its parallels in the Great Depression. Click here for the MP3 audio file accompanying these slides. Note: After the first couple of minutes, I do state which slide I’m referring to — at around Slide 5.

There’s a reason he’s been called Krugtron. Oppose him at your peril. Nevertheless, I’d personally play down the ‘financial catastrophe’ angle of failure to raise the debt ceiling. Krugman in today’s NYT: “it looks quite possible that default would create a huge financial crisis”.I think it would certainly hurt from a GDP point of view, through the […]

Is the high unemployment rate something we have to get used to? “Yes” say the ‘structuralists’ who view the problem as one of mismatch between the jobs needed by the modern economy and the skills offered by the workforce. Since this is a gap that would take a long time to close, we may as […]

I think Krugman essentially has it right about the apparent lack of bond-market excitement over a possible US debt repayment event (which might arise if Congress refuses to authorise a higher debt ceiling). To paraphrase him: why should the markets worry when it has been made crystal clear that the Fed is capable and willing to […]

I’m a hardcore pessimist on the euro-area — perhaps because I’ve spent too much time on the Great Depression. As the saying goes, give a person a hammer, and everything looks like a nail. But I’ll concede one thing: if de-coupling is real (and I am sure it is), then the eurozone story makes a bit […]

What is the only option for a central bank up against the ‘zero lower bound’ (i.e. the policy interest rate has been set to zero) and whose asset purchases (‘quantitative easing’) have little traction? Answer: inflation expectations. The whole point is that, for better or worse (largely for worse), monetary policy has been given the […]

I want to know how the secondary school students in your area are taught history — specifically the Great Depression. The form to capture your feedback is located at http://tinyurl.com/nzsz6sn. Alternatively, you can simply email me photographs of the relevant pages of your textbook. (To get in touch, please first use the “contact” button above.)***I’m working on […]

Serious question. Why don’t sovereign wealth funds (SWFs, the managers of a nation’s commodity windfall, usually) invest in other people’s education? Note that I am specifying other people’s education. I don’t mean this to imply that education levels in the SWF nations are “high enough” (I don’t even know what that would mean, and anyway it certainly […]