Economy

Empires though, are like men... they grow old, flabby and soft. As the generations pass, the pioneering spirit and self-sacrifice which allowed the empire to emerge in the first place, is replaced by selfishness and petty-mindedness.

This points to the fundamental flaw in the Bank of England’s approach to tackling inflation. Clearly, interest rate rises are having an effect. But which interest rate rise was responsible for the collapse of Wilco and the record number of voluntary insolvencies?

You don’t need to pay someone £577,000-per-year to bring down inflation. You just need to generate the biggest economic downturn in a decade.

If only we could accelerate the technological development of the wider world, then we would surely see an explosion in the value created as eight or even ten billion humans harnessed the power of modern technology in an increasingly globalised economy... But that isn’t what happened.

Central bankers, economists and politicians are trying to recreate the recovery of the 1980s. But this cannot work... here's why

The internet has always involved a race to the bottom, in which we seek out the best bargains while the corporations go about finding the cheapest means – which usually involves sweatshops in Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa

If you were looking for a metaphor for the UK economy in 2023, you could do a lot worse than picturing a car that is running on the last vapours in the petrol tank. Its non-financial export industries are a mirage – plants which assemble components imported from elsewhere in the world, together with luxury goods which are vulnerable to the first whiff of a global recession.

So once again, it is ordinary working people – through increased housing costs, depressed wages, and unemployment – who get to pick up the tab – just like they did after 2008 – while the fat cats in the corporations hoover up the remaining assets...

We have entered a death spiral in which oil prices can no longer increase to a point which makes further investment in production viable but nor can prices fall to a level at which a new round of economic growth can begin.

Where 2021 was all about demand-pull, 2023 and 2024 are likely to be about demand-push, as consumer spending crashes, causing the discretionary side of the economy to collapse.