I realise I have not written much about Greece since the open letter to Angela Merkel that Thomas Piketty, Jeffrey Sachs, Dani Rodrik, Heiner Flassbeck and I wrote in July 2015 (see here and here). Nothing has changed to alter the views I expressed then. The excess borrowing, some of which they kept secret, of Greek governments before […]
The Biggest Economic Policy Mistake Of The Last Decade Had Nothing To Do With Academic Economists
“The biggest policy mistake of the last decade” is the title of an article by Ryan Cooper, and the mistake is of course austerity (it is a very US focussed piece, so Brexit is not on the map). Cooper goes through all the academics who gave reasons why austerity was necessary and how their analysis later […]
Trump And Brexit
As Trump makes clear, the UK can choose US rules or EU rules. Brexit is about having no say in either. Of course every Leave voter is an individual with his or her own motives. But if you had to broadly characterise the two big issues that gave the Leave side victory in 2016, it […]
Could The US Become A Democratic Dictatorship?
China calls itself a democratic dictatorship, so it looks like the title’s question is a very odd one to ask. You can find various indices that measure countries on a line with dictatorship at one end and democracy at the other. So how can a country actually be (rather than call itself) a democratic dictatorship? […]
When Two Mass Movements Clash
Last week saw leading lights in one mass movement, the Labour party, attack elements of another mass movement, those who want to remain in the EU. What led to this attack seemed to be posters issued by an organisation called OFOC depicting John McDonnell in the pocket of arch Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg. My own view is that these posters were a […]
A Rotten Corporate Culture
Reports by select committees of MPs after some scandal should be treated with care. There is nothing MPs like more than to take the moral high ground and heap blame on others in front of TV cameras, whether their victims deserve it or not. But in the case of the collapse of Carillion, their condemnation of […]
Fiscal Policy Remains In The Stone Age
Or maybe the middle ages, but certainly not anything more recent than the 1920s. Keynes advocated using fiscal expansion in what he called a liquidity trap in the 1930s. Nowadays we use a different terminology, and talk about the need for fiscal expansion when nominal interest rates are stuck at the Zero Lower Bound or […]
May’s Perpetual Brexit And Labour’s Forsaken Base
Two pieces of recent Brexit news are that a majority of the ‘war cabinet’ outvoted May on the choice between two unworkable, and therefore unacceptable to the EU, proposals to keep the Irish border infrastructure free, and Labour plans not to support a Lords amendment to keep the UK in the Single Market (SM). I […]
The Complete Failure Of The Brexit Project
The Brexit project is already a complete failure. That statement may seem odd, as we are less than one year away from leaving the EU. But what happens in March 2019 if all goes to plan? We leave the EU, but remain in the Single Market (SM) and Customs Union (CU). It is not Brexit […]
A Road To Right Wing Authoritarian Government
This post is inspired by another, by Jan-Werner Müller. I have talked about Müller’s ideas on populism before. This particular post is a plea to focus less on the voters who elect populist politicians, and more on the politicians themselves. He writes: In 2010, Viktor Orbán did not campaign on a promise to draft a […]
The Three Mistakes Of Centrism
Paul Krugman quite rightly often complains about people he calls professional centrists, who always suggest there is a middle road between the ‘extreme’ views of Democrats or Republicans. He noted that such centrists always have to blame both sides, and would typically fail to note that although the Democrats have stayed pretty much in the […]
Do Trump’s Deficits Matter?
Should Democrats complain about the large deficits that Trump and the Republicans are creating? Or is this playing into the Republican narrative that made the stimulus in 2009 inadequate and gave us austerity from then onwards? The answer that mainstream economics gives is straightforward. In a recession when interest rates have hit their lower bound […]