I have forgotten more about economics than I ever knew, and I hope to demonstrate that here today. While many people seem to be losing their heads over yesterday’s rise in the inflation figures, I’m long enough in the tooth to remember a time when such statistics would have been viewed with envy. Certainly inflation [...]
Fund manager Mark Mobius of Templeton Asset Management was interviewed about investing in emerging markets on the BBC’s Working Lunch programme last week. The interviewer, Nik Wood, began by asking just what an emerging market is.
It was actually the IFC, the International Finance Corporation at the World Bank. They were struggling with what to do [...]
Wednesday 13th February 2008
The BBC managed to get awfully excited by yesterday’s inflation figures; both Five Live and Newsnight led on the news that the Consumer Price Index had risen, from 2.1% to 2.2%, while the more widely trusted Retail Price Index had also gone up, from 4% to 4.1%. Cue doom and gloom all round.
But is that [...]
Thursday 15th November 2007
Yesterday Stephen Gerrard joined the fray in calling for some sort of quota system restricting the number of foreign players in the Premier League. What can have influenced his judgment? Could it be the sheer mediocrity of many of the foreigners he has played alongside at Liverpool that has blinded him to the valuable contribution [...]
When people criticise labour markets as being skewed and requiring regulation, they tend to mean that the employer has far greater bargaining power than the employee. It seems obvious that the corporation has the upper hand over the individual, so we need unions and/or employment laws to protect the latter against the former. So it [...]
Despite the Thatcherite revolution of the ‘eighties that promoted privatisation and put nationalised industries to the sword, there is still much ideological discussion about exactly how and where the private and public sectors should operate, about where each sector should draw the line. Nowhere is this perhaps more true than in China as it continues [...]
I’ve just had a brilliant idea. This week’s announcement of an increase in the minimum wage from £5.35 to £5.52 an hour gives me the perfect bogus pretext to dust off and resurrect that half written, half thought out post on the minimum wage I was faffing about with in November, before the birth of [...]
I was never entirely convinced by the Tories’ conversion to “green” policies, so it was encouraging that with their “Damian Green” policy they sounded like they were right back on track.
I’m talking about them talking about immigration, of course, and it is always fun to revisit the subject, especially in the light of the twattish [...]
The news over the weekend announced that more people than ever are having to pay inheritance tax. It is a subject that invites strong opinions, with, apparently, very little in the way of middle ground.
I think that there may be some good arguments about what the threshold for inheritance tax should be, but other than [...]
Kevin Carson’s Mutualist blog included an interesting post a little while ago comparing the innovative Pull Economy with the more traditional Push Economy. In his post he quotes this David Bollier article which explains the difference between the two:
Briefly put, a “push economy” – the familiar industry model of mass production – is based on [...]