Here’s a piece of recent news that you almost certainly missed: A large consumer products company, Johnson & Johnson, announced a one-off loss owing to a 32 percent currency devaluation in Venezuela. The reason I expect you missed that less-than-seismic piece of news is that, unless you happen to be particularly fascinated in Johnson & [...]

Over the coming weeks, we’re going to be hearing a lot about the ‘fiscal cliff’: the threat that some 5% of GDP is going to be ripped out of the economy in a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts. A fiscal slow-down on that scale will almost certainly trigger recession. The CBO thinks so, though their numbers look [...]

A hundred years ago, a generation of men – many of them volunteers – fought an unprecedently bloody war for almost invisible gains. The men were heroes, but the generals commanding them were too often blunderers, too little conscious of the ever-mounting casualties. David Cameron is right to demand that our schoolchildren are reminded of [...]

  Last week, the Bank of England declared its intention to print another £50 billion. Hardly anyone noticed. That £50 billion will bring the Bank’s total money printing to around £425 billion, or about one quarter of British GDP. No one cares. This evening, the U.S. Federal Reserve will announce its own plans for another [...]

Accountable: A letter in the Sunday Times called for Osborne to begin spending cuts a year earlier than planned In February 2010, twenty economists published a letter in the Sunday Times calling on George Osborne to begin spending cuts a year earlier than planned. The key sentence of that letter stated that, ‘In order to be credible, [...]

Last week I wrote a piece about Congress: its failure to take responsibility for problems, the way its un-shining example has a tendency to corrupt all our other national institutions. The post garnered a remarkable number of comments, the majority of which agreed strongly with the view I expressed. Just one thing disturbed me, however, which [...]

Two bits of news in the last couple days. One, Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has decided to extend Operation Twist, a policy whereby the Fed sells short-dated government paper in order to buy the longer-dated sort. It sounds boring but it involves $267 billion, so it’s kind of consequential all the same. [...]

Jose Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission, got snappish when asked about the Eurozone crisis by a Canadian journalist.  ‘Frankly, we are not here to receive lessons in terms of democracy or in terms of how to handle the economy,’ he said. ‘This crisis was not originated in Europe; seeing as you mention [...]

The United Kingdom has too much debt. Reports normally focus on government debt: currently around 80% of national income, unless you take into account (as you should) the debts of the bailed-out banks and their toxic portfolios, which would pretty much double that figure. But what about consumer debt? Mortgage debt? Business debt? The huge [...]

You know those summer thunderstorms we used to have? You’d be sitting out in a warm garden somewhere, sipping something cold and white, looking at lightning flashing on the horizon and counting the seconds until you could hear the thunder. Well, it’s like that now, only the gap between the flash and the rumble is [...]