Wednesday, 25 June 2025

QE, QT and interest on reserves

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 The Bank of England governor has written a very good lette r after a reform MP suggested not paying interest on reserves. My thoughts. 1. P...
Monday, 16 June 2025

Foreign Trade, tariffs, Dollar dominance and some helpful national income identities

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 The brilliant Maurice Obstfeld has a very good explainer on  The U.S. Trade Deficit: Myths and Realities, Brookings Conference, March 2025...
Tuesday, 3 June 2025

Even more chain drift

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 I hadn't realised until now that the Johnson review has a nice box on Chain drift. Here's the idea.  1. Suppose the item 1 is deter...
Sunday, 1 June 2025

Some maths of public spending and labour costs

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 From th e IFS  and my interpretation:  " Staff costs account for almost half of departmental day-to-day spending.." "At this...

Slow productivity growth: lessons from the past

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 I am late to this, but this article by the brilliant economic historian Joel Mokyr is fantastic. "(2018), ‘The Past and Future of Inno...
Wednesday, 30 April 2025

US and UK TFP since the pandemic

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 The BLS has just published an update on US labour and TFP growth .  Heres a graph of  private non-farm business. Red is TFP growth, dark bl...
Tuesday, 29 April 2025

Tariffs and the UK economy

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 1. There are lots of conflicting effects of tariffs on UK inflation and activity.  They are set out by Megan Greene in a very interesting r...
Tuesday, 22 April 2025

How to reduce inequality: ban the National Lottery and Nobel Prizes

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 The excellent and insightful Nick Oulton (https://www.lse.ac.uk/CFM/assets/pdf/CFM-Discussion-Papers-2022/CFMDP2022-05-Paper.pdf),  link  ...

What is a log point? 100*ln(new/old).

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 Nerdy. Often when doing growth in Economics, we use change in natural logs.   For a change to y from x, the log point change = 100*ln(y/x)....
Monday, 24 March 2025

Planning again

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 The brilliant Sam Dumitriu ,  points us to the lunacy that is the  Bristol and Portishead  rail link.  from a brilliant piece by Ben Hopkin...