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Robots and local elections: difficult to predict
Labour Deputy Leader Tom Watson is concerned. The rise of robots, he says, poses a danger which needs to be addressed. Low-skilled jobs will be threatened and [...]
The EU’s mad fight against Google
Last Wednesday, the EU charged Google with using its dominant Android operating system to hinder competition. The EU’s competition commissioner, Margrethe [...]
UK unemployment: the Living Wage in action
The National Living Wage of £7.20/ hour is now law. UK unemployment rose for the first time in 7 months. Is there a connection? Too early to tell, some might [...]
Fiscal dominance: how central banks will wipe out your savings
We already wrote about the threat of an outright war on cash, motivated by the central banks’ need to make a zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) effective by [...]
Abenomics’ predictable failure
When it was announced that in Q4 2015 Japan’s GDP was shrinking by a whopping 1.4% on an annualised basis it confirmed that the land of the rising sun is [...]
The real minimum wage is still zero
The UK labour market has a persistent malaise: low productivity and the resulting anaemic wage growth. This has been a feature of the British economy since the [...]
The great steel robbery
UK industry has been in decline for decades, and for the very good reason that production costs are simply too high to compete with Asia and other [...]
Does the trade deficit matter?
The trade balance is getting a lot of attention in the US presidential primaries, due to Donald Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric. Trump wants trade barriers to [...]
Chinese recession is coming
For the last couple of years the talk has been of a Chinese ‘hard landing’, meaning growth dropping below the 6-8% we have witnessed the last few years. [...]
Iain Duncan Smith: politics, not economics
The resignation of Iain Duncan Smith dominates headlines, and for good reasons: the narrative that the Bullingdon Club boys in the Conservative government are [...]