What I miss about meetings is the doodling

I’m sorry. It’s a slow day.   And I wish to apologise also for the taxpayer’s money I must have wasted.  

Scottish productivity

The FT reports today that Scotland had a large – 11% – productivity gap with the rest of the country. The reason that this gap is so much larger than you might have thought is that the academics correctly use Total Factor Productivity to assess the question. The usual story only looks at Labour productivity

A defence of hot air?

I have about eight different bloggers in my “Must Read” category on Feedly.  One of them is Tony Yates, lately of the Bank of England and now at longandvariable. His most recent post has a go at its own medium, with the self-explanatory title “Blogging is still mostly unpaid hot air”.  The thesis is almost self-evidently

Bloodletting analogies or Don’t get Levels and Rates of Change confused

(all of this puts at too great length what FlipChartRick’s greatest Venn Diagram of the Coalition period says in a single picture. One of the weakest and yet most common arguments you will hear about austerity – outside of government, but even, shamefully, within Whitehall – is: we have managed Austerity of X%/year so far. 

Future fiscal plans – what the LibDems seem to have said

I have been asked by a couple of people what I think of Nick Clegg’s recent Bloomberg speech covering fiscal policy. This is a big topic, so consider this a holding reply. Over the last few years the entire fiscal debate has veered all over the place, in particular about whether it damaged growth and how much

When did the Great Recession start?

If you put this question to most economists at the tail end of 2008, they would have said “around the time Lehman Brothers collapsed”. The last Inflation Report of the year showed things flat in Q2, and then that first bad quarter in 15 years in 2008Q3.  However, the latest data from the ONS suggests it got far worse

The LibDems could get The Economist endorsement

But I am not sure it would be a good thing … For entirely innocent reasons I found myself trying to remember what I thought Liberal Democrat fiscal policy was before the last election. Entirely innocent, I assure you. I came across my post discussing the endorsements of the Guardian and the Economist for the

Five things ….

My article for the FT is up here I am not adding any more because the FT is always worth paying for.  Especially tomorrow …

Creation Myths

From time to time you can read that this or that sector accounts for a vast amount of the job creation in the economy.  What you are reading is nearly always misleading. The sectors concerned might be: new firms; start up firms; small firms; and firms in a particular sector, such as Low Carbon, or

This is why thinking about monetary policy as “all about interest rates” is confusing

Today I noticed in the FT that the German Savers lobby is complaining about rates being kept too low.  They want tighter monetary policy, because they think it will suit them. Maybe.  Tighter monetary policy would drive down inflation, perhaps even lead to outright deflation.  In real terms, people who have cash savings will benefit from