I am a great believer in divergence when it comes to the talking about the economy and her markets because it allows you to take a slightly more nuanced perspective than the risk off/risk on debate that has dominated the discourse for the past two years now.
The Global Economy

Still, there is much [...]

Financial Times reports (link) on the new measure of poverty proposed by economists from Oxford University. The authors suggested the modification of current measure of poverty which, defined by the World Bank in annually published World Development Report, is currently set at the threshold of $1.25 per day or less. [...]

Blog post series, like the vuvuzela, is the new bacon; it works with everything and with John Hempton’s recent excellent series on the economics of default in the Eurozone and Edward’s recent postings on AFOE in which he pulls out some of our old paper abstracts has inspired me to a series in [...]

Trace: Welcome back to the RunToGold Podcast. This is Trace Mayer. And I have with us a special guest, Bill Laggner of Bearing Asset Management. Welcome Bill.
Bill: Trace, good to hear from you today.
Trace: Wonderful. Now can you tell us a little bit about Bearing Asset?
Bill: Trace, we run a hedge [...]

Ever since the original proposition by a 19th century German economist Adolph Wagner, Wagner’s law has undergone significant theoretical and empirical discussion on its long-run validity. In the most basic and rudimentary version, the law states that alongside the economic development of industrial societies, there is a persistent tendency of an increasing share of government [...]

Greg Mankiw (link) and David Leonhardt (link) have opened a debate on whether govenrment policymakers should levy a tax on soda and other soft drinks as an attempt to reverse the growing trend of obesity among the U.S. population. The idea of taxing soda has become popular as governments around the world have recorded high [...]

Turning back the Clock on Global Monetary Policy
Sovereign risk and debt continues to mark the fault lines in the global macro landscape and thus the main discourse. In this context and although the technical recovery is still a reality the discourse has started to move into a decidedly bearish mood. I find this interesting [...]

I get the impression from the methodology chapter of their recent book, ‘Identity Economics’, that George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton are not particularly interested in econometric tests of the predictive power of their theory. They suggest that it is difficult to falsify any theory because ‘even the most straight forward test has literally millions of [...]

A bunch of people are tweeting and retweeting the question “I didn’t look today, did the free market clean up the oil yet?”
I have a couple of responses to that. First that there is no such thing as a free market. You’re not free to sell something unless someone else is willing to [...]

The OECD Factblog highlighted a comparison of tax burden across the OECD countries. The main findings of the comparison is that overall tax burden, measured as a percentage of labor costs, is the highest in Western European countries. Belgium, Hungary, Germany and France are the countries with the highest overall tax burden while Ireland, Iceland, [...]