Through the person of its US “finance and economics editor”, Heidi Moore. Would you believe it she’s even worse than the Guardian’s UK economics nutters? For the first time, the US is changing the way it measures its economic growth, the measure we call our gross domestic product. Starting in July, the keepers of US [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Economics'
The Guardian does economics with Heidi Moore
April 24th, 2013 · 13 Comments
Tags: Economics
No, not really Lord Browne, not really
April 23rd, 2013 · 20 Comments
‘Tis always the same, isn’t it? To an engineer everything is engineering. To a politician all is politics, to a Marxist all is class. Thus we find ourselves with Lord Browne telling us how the economy works: The state of a nation is no more and no less than a function of what its people [...]
Tags: Economics
Erm, excuse me Mr. Milliband….
April 19th, 2013 · 11 Comments
The Labour leader will use a keynote speech to argue that Britain needs a new economic model that rejects the “orthodoxies of the 1980s”, such as the dominance of the financial services sector over heavy industry. Finance, wholesale finance as in The City, provides some 4% of GDP. Industry provides 12% or so. What dominance?
Tags: Economics
This is fun from Jeremy Warner
April 12th, 2013 · 2 Comments
”We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down – at any rate in Great Britain; that a decline in prosperity [...]
Tags: Economics
How lovely, this will enrage just about everyone
April 11th, 2013 · 9 Comments
The UK outstrips the United States, Germany, France and Japan for overall progress in living standards, infrastructure and individual opportunity according to the index designed by a team of US economists. Only Sweden scores more highly overall in the new “Social Progress Index” (SPI), which ranks 50 leading countries by combining figures on everything from [...]
Tags: Economics
Polly should like this on the minimum wage
April 2nd, 2013 · 5 Comments
Minimum wage could be frozen or cut if it starts to cost jobs or damage economy, Government suggests The minimum wage for millions of people could have to be capped or frozen in future if it risks damaging jobs or the economy, the Government has said. What they’re really saying is that the Low Pay [...]
Tags: Economics
Interesting number, eh?
April 1st, 2013 · 19 Comments
And almost 900,000 have dropped their claim to the taxpayer-funded benefits rather than undergo a new medical test as part of the Coalition welfare reforms. We all knew that the various incapacity/invalidity benefits were being used as a way to disguise unemployment. It’s been something of a deliberate policy since Maggie’s day. But the numbers [...]
Tags: Economics
Well, yes and no Mr. Cohen, yes and no
March 31st, 2013 · 59 Comments
Such complaints are normally dismissed as “Luddism”. But just because the 19th-century Luddites were wrong about the original industrial revolution destroying jobs and living standards does not mean that their successors must always be wrong. Sensible economists worry about automated manufacturing replacing factory workers, Google’s autonomous cars replacing lorry and taxi drivers, and automatic online [...]
Tags: Economics
Why this capitalism neoliberal globalisation thing is so pro-poor
March 24th, 2013 · 9 Comments
News in from China: At the recently built head office of Zhejiang Hongyu Medical Commodity Co.Ltd – the medical supplies firm which also sells to the UK’s 99p Stores and Castleford-based firm OTL – factory workers said they put in 10-hour days, with two days off each month. For that, they are paid around £320. [...]
Tags: Economics
Ain’t globalisation and neoliberalism great?
March 23rd, 2013 · 3 Comments
And this is just one indication among many that the poor may not, after all, always be with us, in what is one of the great under-reported developments of our time. Last week the UN’s blue-chip Human Development Report confirmed that governments have surpassed their target, three years early, of halving the share of the [...]
Tags: Economics
An Academic’s budget proposal
March 20th, 2013 · 11 Comments
A successful budget tomorrow would be one that signals the Treasury understands that investments in human capital, infrastructure and education are essential to growth. Hardly a surprise, could even be right, but “Give me more money” isn’t the most convincing of submissions.
Tags: Economics
Well, yes Polly, but
March 12th, 2013 · 12 Comments
Wealth taxes only deliver 5.9% of revenues, mostly in council tax And that’s still well above the percentage of tax revenue that other OECD countries get from taxing property/wealth. Your little statistics there is showing us how much more of this we do than other countries.
Tags: Economics
Mr. Chakrabortty’s history
March 12th, 2013 · 7 Comments
The most famous episode of austerity was during the interwar years, as Germany, Britain, France and Japan all fought to stay on the Gold Standard even amid the Great Depression. The deflationary impact of keeping their currencies pegged to gold, along with the austerity policies they followed to do so, was disastrous. In Britain, unemployment [...]
Tags: Economics
Nice try from Janet Daly here but no cigar
March 10th, 2013 · 9 Comments
I can remember arguing with a very distinguished economist that the tax burden on the poor should be reduced. He accepted that this might be morally desirable but he was adamant that it would have no affect on the wider economy because, he said, the poor do not spend enough to have an impact on [...]
Tags: Economics
How amusing. Ha-Joon Chang proves that fiscal expansion won’t work
March 9th, 2013 · 19 Comments
So, as we know, the great shout from the left is that if we just spend more money through hte government then everything will be peachy once again. And then along comes a lefty econopmist to prove that this won’t actually work. Not that he says so out loud you understand, but it is the [...]
Tags: Economics
Just to remind you how small the African economies are
March 4th, 2013 · 7 Comments
Take a gander at this. Comparing the size of African economies to those of English counties. London roughly equals Nigeria for example, the Seychelles the Isle of Wight, Zimbabwe Northumbria. One point to be made being that we would consider someone entirely mad if they tried to suggest trade barriers in between English counties. Or [...]
Tags: Economics
Numbers and journalists don’t really mix, do they?
February 26th, 2013 · 3 Comments
One a Telegraph slide show at the top we get: Value of money slides 30pc in 30 years as cost of goods rockets And in the caption, on the same page, we get: The value of money has plummeted by 67pc over the last 30 years as the cost of everyday goods has rocketed, research [...]
Tags: Economics
Err, no, just no
February 19th, 2013 · 26 Comments
Dozen homes worth £500,000 each on the brink of collapsing into the sea after appalling weather speeds up cliff erosion Land owned by John Radford, 62, for 45 years eroded by 15 metres in weeks He and his wife feel ‘trapped’ because dangerous houses are ‘unsellable’ If they’re unsellable then they’re not worth £500,000 each. [...]
Tags: Economics
How to defend this horrible, exploitative, oppressive capitalism shit
February 16th, 2013 · 1 Comment
Tags: Economics
Lordy me, is this going to become the next mantra?
February 16th, 2013 · 9 Comments
Neo-liberals need to understand that while, sure, economies need entrepreneurs and innovators, economies also need customers – lots of customers, with lots of disposable income. That’s the real crisis in the neoliberal west: a crisis of consumption. Too many people are not rich enough for capitalism to function properly. Lessee. Capitalism functioned pretty well in [...]
Tags: Economics