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 […]

The Federal Reserve is not part of the federal government and it is not a bank. The Federal Reserve Board is referred to as The Board of Governors and is located in the Marriner Eccles building in Washington DC. Seven governors are appointed for 14-year terms with the chairman and vice-chairman being appointed to serve […]

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 […]

Barack Obama made a speech recently pledging his opposition to (yet another) game of chicken over America’s debt ceiling. “This is the United States of America,” he told his audience. “We’re not some banana republic. This is not a deadbeat nation. We don’t run out on our tab. We’re the world’s bedrock investment – the […]

As the initial shocks of the financial crisis of 2008-09 began to subside, policy makers – shattered by the scale and velocity of what they had just witnessed – started to think about earthquake prevention measures: how to stop the same thing happening all over again, One of the simplest, and best, such suggestions came […]

At yet another select committee recently – they’ve been doing a good job – Vince Cable was grilled about the huge leap in the Royal Mail’s stock market value. As you’ll remember, the firm was floated at 330p a share and traded as high as 600p in November, a rise of 82% in a few […]

So, the European Commission’s President Manuel Barroso says that it would be “difficult, if not impossible” for an independent Scotland to become an automatic member of the European Union. George Osborne and (worse) his senior Treasury adviser Sir Nicholas Macpherson have ruled out any likelihood of currency union. These things were predictable, perhaps, though Alex […]

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 […]

At the last election, during a TV debate between the three putative chancellors (Messrs Darling, Osborne and Cable), Krishna Guru-Murthy, asked, ‘Do you agree that cuts we are going to be facing will be deeper than the cuts that Mrs. Thatcher had to put through Britain?’ Alastair Darling answered, ‘Well, … they’re going to have […]