Tag Archives: recession
Between Debt and the Devil: A Review
According to Adair Turner, Britain’s former chief financial regulator, the global financial crisis had one big cause: bad ideas. These are ideas that Turner disapproves of. The key proposition of his new book is simply stated: “banking systems left to themselves are bound to produce too much of the wrong sort of debt, instability and…
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Lord Lawson aims at the wrong target
Governments’ failure to manage the global financial crisis is having profound political and geo-political consequences – all of them adverse. Fuelled by political desperation to boost demand, national monetary policies are becoming steadily more aggressive – not so much “beggar my neighbour” as “sauve qui peut”. Financial repression is ongoing. As we all know, once…
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Good riddance to inflation targets
As predicted in The Money Trap, governments and central banks are preparing to ditch the inflation target regime of monetary policy. Hilariously if predictably, they are insisting that it has succeeded – but that it is time to move on. So long as they bury their heads in the sand like this, no…
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“Oh, what a lovely slump!”
Older readers of this column may remember a British film of the late 1960s called “Oh, What a Lovely War”, a skit on the first world war, using popular songs of the time, starring the likes of John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave and Maggie Smith (her of the TV series “Downton Abbey” )….
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Volcker, Lagarde, Rees-Mogg and the Ikon
Lord Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times, London and doyen of British commentators, has called for a reform of the global financial system (GFS). Rees-Mogg quotes Paul Volcker, who in a recent interview described the present period as one of the most difficult in history: “This is a recession on top of a complete financial…
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LSE Book Review: The Money Trap
“The Money Trap… offers a welcome alternative to most accounts of the Financial Crisis. The solutions may be on the radical side, but as growth forecasts continue to be revised downwards, and job figures continue to disappoint, such approaches may come to seem ever less radical.” Two weeks ago, delegates at the Republican National Convention nominated Mitt Romney…
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Still trapped
I started writing The Money Trap two years ago because I had become irritated by the narrow terms in which the economic debate was being conducted. In all advanced countries, the same arguments, between those who wanted more expansionary policies and those who insisted on more austerity, rolled on without resolution – and without producing…
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