Italy’s recent election was not that much of a shocker for Italians who have endured over 16 years of zero economic growth and youth unemployment around 27% or more, without much hope in sight. In fact, Italy’s underlying economic and employment problems are the same now as they were 16 years ago—too much debt and […]

Remember him?: The risks have not gone away since Hank Paulson was US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Hank. Remember him? Of the crisis in 2008, he said: “Where I come from, if someone takes a risk and they’re going to make the profit from that risk, they shouldn’t have the taxpayer pay for the losses.” […]

Mervyn King’s decade at the Bank of England was a disaster. The Bank was too slack during the long and indisciplined boom, under prepared for the crash and playing catch-up thereafter. The legacy of Lord King’s (and Gordon Brown’s) career has been an economy still limping along far below peak output, real wages caught in […]

Barack Obama was recently on the stump, defending the latest set of lackluster jobs figures. Obama blamed ‘serious headwinds’ including higher gas prices and, more recently, the developing crisis in the Eurozone. Having handed much of the blame to foreign oilfields and European crises, he returned to more familiar ground, bashing a Republican-controlled House for blocking some of the proposals in […]

Chris Menon interviews the author of the best-selling Planet Ponzi on the housing bubble, market manipulation, gold and the subversion of democracy Monday, 16 June 2014 at 09:49 Chris Menon: In Planet Ponzi you’ve written about the huge debt bubble that was created over the past 30 years. For those who haven’t read your book, how […]

Last week, a brave police constable told a startled Parliamentary select committee that crime statistics were being artificially manipulated to keep recorded crime on its downward path. In one remarkable exchange, the committee’s chair, Bernard Jenkin, asked: “This [the police process] would finish up with trying to persuade a victim that they weren’t raped, for […]

Ed Miliband has a point. When this country toppled into crisis in 2007-08, it was widely feared that the financial collapse would lead to mass unemployment on a scale that dwarfed the recession of the early 1980s. And it hasn’t happened, or not quite. Yes, unemployment is really bad. Yes, the statistics are manipulated. And […]

On 15 September 2008, Lehman Brothers, a “bulge bracket” investment bank, filed for bankruptcy. That should have been no big deal. The failure of a single, poorly run institution should have had no broader effect on the domestic US economy, let alone the global one. Things didn’t pan out that way. Lehman Brothers was the […]

The dual mandate of the Federal Reserve is a good one. It is charged with ensuring stable prices and maximum employment. That’s a good basic recipe, one which served the country well. And notice what isn’t there. The Fed is not charged with distorting natural market pricing mechanisms to the point of perverting risk. It […]

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 […]