June 29th, 2010 This rap anthem featuring Friedrich August Hayek and John Maynard Keynes neatly encapsulates the ideological gulf between those who advocate maintaining a debt-fuelled stimulus until economic recovery is assured and those who are leary of such reckless interventionism, preferring to make public sector cutbacks to address sovereign debt overhangs. Or as the [...]
June 28th, 2010 Kartik Athreya, a staff economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, seems to want to close down the econonoblogosphere. In an extraodinarily ill-judged ‘essay’ Athreya, who has a PhD in the dismal science, argues that only qualified economists should be given any credence by “open minded consumers”, implying that non-economists who [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: The Sunday Times Date: June 27th, 2010 Buy-back deal allows Corporate Jet Service directors to avoid millions of pounds of debt to unsecured creditors Directors of an aviation business that went bust owing HBOS £113m were able to buy it back from the administrators for an initial payment of just seven [...]
June 26th, 2010 Britain’s new chancellor, George Osborne, has this week come in a volley of abuse from neo-Keynesian economists, left-wing commentators and opposition Labour MPs. His critics are enraged by his decision to “supplicate before the market Gods” and “recklessly endanger Britain’s economic future” by imposing an austerity budget on Britain last Tuesday, June [...]
June 25th, 2010 The absurdities of short term corporate makeover are hilariously exposed by Andrew Hill, in today’s Lombard column in the Financial Times. In his piece Andrew decries the absurdity of the multiple name changes at the UK electronics retailer once known simply as Dixons. Andrew talks us through the switchback ride of confusing [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Financial Times (FTfm) Date: June 21st, 2010 The ghost of a dead economist was haunting the Zermatt Summit, a new annual event on the subject of ‘humanizing globalization’ held earlier this month. Several speakers at the three-day conference, held in the picturesque Swiss alpine resort in the shadow of the Matterhorn, [...]
June 14th, 2010 A firm of accountants which last year was found guilty of enabling celebrities, sportsmen and other wealthy clients to evade £219 million in tax, and whose partner Simon Glyn was personal assistant to the bank manager at the epicentre of the Bank of Scotland Reading scandal, an alleged £1bn money laundering fraud, [...]
June 13th, 2010 The UK libel laws are so biased towards deep-pocketed litigants eager to block free speech that the UK was recently characterised as the defamation capital of the world. The system must be changed. It leads to an over-cautiousness among in-house media lawyers and a prevailing timidity and kneejerk, mealy-mouthed self-censorship amongst UK [...]
June 9th, 2010 The trial of French “rogue trader” Jérôme Kerviel got underway yesterday in the Palais de Justice on Paris’s Ile de la Cité. The case hinges on whether Kerviel, who has become something of an anti-hero in France, could have acted autonomously when concocting the trades that lost his employer Société Generale €4.9 [...]
June 8th, 2010 The Bilderberg Meetings have opted to shed their shroud of secrecy. A new official Bilderberg Meetings website has provided a full list of everyone who attended the recently ended Bilderberg conference in the Catalonian seaside resort of Sitges. It also lists those who attended last year’s meeting held in Vouliagmeni, Greece and [...]