Economics

By Professor Christopher H. Bovis, Professor of International and European Business Law, University of Hull Inevitably, the question of UK membership of the European Union will be centred on two issues: The need for reform of EU institutions and the way the EU is governed The ability of the UK to influence EU decisions Reform is badly needed The European Union is malfunctioning. It has lost the zest of the “common market”,becoming instead a self-fulfilling prophesy of political union with disproportionally...

By Brett Scott  Money pervades our everyday economic interactions. But, despite its importance, it is also pervasively misunderstood. Here are three common monetary myths – frequently perpetuated by economists – that need challenging. Myth 1: Money emerges from barter Economists often tell a tale about how old communities first used barter to exchange goods and services. Bartering throws up tricky situations. Take as an example a farmer trying to exchange a cow for bread from a baker, a clumsy and...

By Darragh Roche The term 'job creator' has crept into the political lexicon on both sides of the Atlantic. It sounds harmless, but don't be fooled - it is the quiet vanguard of a political and economic nightmare. Calling Ayn Rand a novelist is generous, calling her a philosopher borders on the ludicrous. But her corpus of regressive ideas has ignited the hard right in the United States. The coming Republican presidential primaries will give deficit hawks and would-be economic...

By Dr Nigel Mellor Buddhist economics will be forever associated with the work of Ernst Friedrich (Fritz) Schumacher. He brought us the powerful ideas of ‘intermediate technology’ and ‘small is beautiful’. In promoting ‘limits to growth’ and ‘sustainable development’, he was far ahead of his time. Schumacher wanted to restore the dignity of work, within economies built around a ‘middle way’, with ‘appropriate scale’ production. These concepts helped build his enlightened Buddhist economics which is still very relevant today (the...

The annual economic outlook for 2015 has been released by Invesco, revealing that faster growth of the quantity of money is desperately needed to avoid deflation. Despite a more positive economic outlook in 2014 we’re still hearing warning signs about the state of the global economy from all directions. Figures from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, have shown that the Eurozone experienced deflation of 0.2 per cent in December compared to the same month last year and...

By Valentina Magri    "Computers double their speed and memory capacity every 18 months. The risk is that computers develop intelligence and take over. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded”. Stephen Hawking's prediction of the future of the human race has rattled a few people. The physicist, who has motor neurone disease and uses a system designed by Intel to speak, essentially grounded sci-fi prophecies of robots out-thinking humans that have been...

A new report has revealed a cultural change in banks may take a generation, with the cost of poor culture far exceeding previous estimates. British retail banks and building societies have paid out at least £38.5 billion in fines and redress for customers over the last 15 years, with at least £27 billion of that due to the mis-selling of PPI. Poor culture also resulted in poor customer service, with banks have receiving 20.8 million complaints between 2008 and the first half of 2014, and 25 million between 2006 and...

By J T Coombes    www.globalmagnacarta.com    @GMagnaCarta Many years ago I had a bank manager as a next door neighbour. He was a lovely man, a bit like Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army, who cared about people but without the pomposity. After he retired we began to see the closure of bank branches and the centralisation of banking services. When I asked his view on these changes he said that we were now witnessing the end of banking in...

By Valentina Magri Inequality has been one of the most heated topics of economic debate in 2014 after the great success of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. The book was awarded the 2014 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year prize on 11 November 2014. Mr Piketty, who is in China promoting his book, said in the accepting video that “issues about economic wealth and capital and public debt are too important to be left to a...