Economy

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 …

Britain is approaching the final stage in its energy death spiral.  A combination of increasing delivery costs and lower real-terms incomes has been accelerated by greater degrees by Brexit, two years of lockdowns and the severance of imports of oil and gas from Russia.  At the same time, the previously …

The UK is already in a de facto recession – only the fiddling of the data to count GP appointments as a value-adding activity led to a paltry 0.5 percent GDP growth in May.  Discretionary spending has already plummeted, and it is only a matter of time before we see …

Real life Bond villain Klaus Schwab has become the focus of ridicule following crude attempts to remove articles praising Sri Lanka’s “Vision 2025” economic plan from the World economic Forum (WEF) website – the world’s leading proponent of the hi-tech fourth industrial revolution apparently not realising that nothing ever disappears …