The Bank of England is considering negative interest rates to “stimulate” the economy, together with more QE. It’s one thing to pay a bank for safe-keeping and other services, another for the central bank to manipulate the credit markets as a whole. It is explicitly a policy of expropriating savers, […]
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Read MoreJust spotted on ThinkMarkets, a critique of the attempt to make economics like engineering: I have no problem with better matching techniques for students applying to medical school or trying to get into certain popular courses and so forth. But I do object to the project of making economics more […]
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This week, following the promotion of Michael Fallon MP to BIS, I’m bidding for election by Conservative colleagues to the Treasury Select Committee. I’d like to scrutinise and help the Treasury as it charts a course to reduce the deficit and mend the public finances. I’d also like to continue to […]
Read More In his speech yesterday, potential Governor of the Bank of England Paul Tucker discussed moral hazard, agency problems, short-termism and the “manifestly false” assumptions of risk models. I almost feel prophetic. He also said: When credit markets become overly exuberant, not only do the balance sheets of lenders become stretched, […]
Read MoreSince I introduced a measure criticising IFRS accounting and requiring banks to prepare accounts to UK standards, there have been a stream of developments backing up my criticisms. The problem extends as far as Korea. Via bruegel.org: Korean firms’ business activities, such as risk management and foreign investment, have been […]
Read MoreAnother excellent video from LearnLiberty.org, in which Lawrence White concludes it would be dangerous to leave the control of money with the same institutions which caused the present crisis, hoping they will do better in future: What would it mean to “End the Fed?” Free banking expert and professor Lawrence […]
Read MoreThere was a beautiful symmetry to last week’s policy announcement by the Fed. Precisely a week after the ECB had pledged its commitment to unlimited purchases of Euro Zone government bonds, the Fed declared that its new round of debt monetization – ‘quantitative easing’ or QE3 – would be open-ended. […]
Read MoreVince Cable answered an urgent question on industrial policy in the Commons yesterday. In the supplementaries, I asked: Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con):Will my right hon. Friend reassure me that he will not allow Opposition Members, in their clamour for economic intervention, to drive us back to the misery and impoverishment […]
Read MoreOn levels of debt: On the madness of QE and the current economic consensus: On the battle of economic ideas:
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