2013/04/28 10:43
After the introduction of the euro, the German politicians got worried that Germany wasn't the best place to run a business any more (the "Standort Deutschland" discussion). As a result of this, salaries and other labour costs were lowered. This reform was a success, insomuch as the German economy subsequently boomed. However, one might argue that this reform was partly...
2012/12/18 17:38
The release of data from the 2011 census in England and Wales makes for interesting reading. (Scotland's census won't release any equivalent data until some time next year.)One thing I found very interesting is how different London is. It's not immediately obvious when you read the bulletins how big this difference is, because they haven't published the data for England...
2013/05/12 22:37
I must have overlooked
this very interesting blog post by The Telegraph’s Thomas Pascoe (probably because the Scottish holidays had already started at the time).
He’s arguing that Gordon Brown wasn’t an innumerate idiot when he sold most of the UK’s gold reserves at a ridiculously low price, as most people had assumed.
What he really did was trying to salvage the banking system:
It seemed almost as if the Treasury was trying to achieve the lowest price possible for the public’s gold. It was.
[...]
Faced with the prospect of a global collapse in the banking system, the Chancellor took the decision to bail out the banks by dumping Britain’s gold, forcing the price down and allowing the banks to buy back gold at a profit, thus meeting their borrowing obligations.
If true, this puts the gold sale in a completely different light. It was perhaps after all the right thing to do at the time (although I wonder whether bailing out a few banks would actually have cost more than the value of all that gold today), but why didn’t Gordon Brown afterwards try to strengthen the banking system instead of letting them continue their merry games until the system finally crashed in 2007?
2013/03/05 21:48
Of course it's not exactly news to readers of this blog, but this YouTube video illustrates the point even better than the original graph:As I wrote 2½ years ago, it would be interesting to see something similar for European countries.
2013/01/13 12:43
I was reading The Economist's featured article on innovation pessimism yesterday. It's very interesting, and definitely worth reading.Before I read it, I said to my beloved wife that it isn't very surprising if innovation is grinding to a halt, given how scientists are underpaid and ridiculed while footballers, reality TV stars and mediocre musicians are treated like demigods, and youngsters...
2012/12/07 16:46
The front page of today's Economist is dedicated to a story about what would happen if Britain left the EU.I can easily understand the attraction for people and businesses in Greater London (a.k.a. South-East England): London is to a large...
2012/10/30 17:17
The unionists seem to be in a tizzy about the prospect that Scotland will be forced to join the euro, so let's have a rational look at the most likely scenarios.To start with, it's entirely possible (perhaps even likely) that...
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