Solving immigration is a question of economics
Across Europe and the USA, immigration is the hottest of political topics. How many immigrants is too many? Who should be allowed in and who should be turned away? How far does our obligation to help refugees actually go? But underlying the often heated discussion lies the fact that many Western economies have become dependent on immigration. In many [...]
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 forcing money to [...]
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 still sinking, as [...]
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 Great Recession [...]
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 low-wage/cost economies. The [...]
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 “protect” US [...]
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. But that’s not [...]
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 looking after [...]
Why the EU referendum is not so important after all
The general consensus among believers in free markets is that the UK should vote to leave the EU in the June referendum. And as a general principle, the chance to leave a [...]
Fed and BoE rate decisions: central bankers peddling fiction
Time flies. It is only few months back when everyone thought the Federal Reserve was going to raise US interest rates again at their March meeting. Well, it was yesterday and [...]
Another big government budget for the UK
George Osborne is a prudent man. Like any financially responsible person, he is aware that you need to produce before you can consume. In his own words, he wants to "act now [...]