Economy

Year-on-year price rises continue here in the UK, driven almost entirely by broken supply chains, rising energy costs and fertiliser shortages (which cause the rise in food prices).  For journalists, politicians and central bankers (trapped in the neoliberal belief that inflation is the greatest economic evil) the solution is simple …

The UK government has spent the weekend heavily briefing that big tax increases are on the way.  The return of former Chancellors George Osborne and Philip Hammond to government circles also suggests another round of economy-crushing austerity is also being considered.  As George Parker at the Financial Times reported yesterday: …

Let’s talk about supply shocks.  Cast your mind back to the beginning of March 2020.  Remember how everyone panic bought pasta and toilet paper?  Except that it didn’t really happen – at least on a large scale.  What happened was, in their usual underhand way, the establishment media paid supermarket …

Making any kind of prediction is always risky… especially about the future.  Nevertheless, there is a growing consensus that a recession is on the way – I would argue that had it not been for rigged official data, a recession would have already arrived.  Less clear though, is what kind …

The Severn Estuary is about an hour’s bicycle ride from where I live.  It has the second largest tidal range in the world – around a 50 feet difference between a high and low spring tide.  But here’s the thing, the tide does not recede the moment the high tide …

When economies fall apart, politicians point to issues of confidence.  So it is, that this weekend we witnessed “Dagenham Liz” Truss blaming the collapse in the Pound on a “failure to prepare the ground,” rather than understanding it as evidence of the underlying weakness of the UK economy.  This has …

Marx was right… No, bear with me.  Marx was right when he argued that there must be some input to the productive process which provided far more value than was paid for.  Because if everything involved in the productive process was paid exactly what it was worth, then there could …

I’ve often wondered whether the band on the Titanic really played-on bravely even as they approached their watery fate, or more likely that they were suffering from what psychologists refer to as denial.  That is, faced with growing evidence of their own, imminent icy end, might they have unconsciously grasped …

To bring J.K. Galbraith up to date, we might say that “the modern neoliberal is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”  So it is that we have begun to see what I call “the downward …

What, then, are we to make of the Bank of England following the US Federal Reserve in raising interest rates by 0.5 percent?  If Bank of England Governor, Andrew Bailey is to be believed – and there is good reason not to believe him, the central bank is merely following …