Economics

By Phillip Oppenheim Cuba – sexy, sultry, sandy, salsa – and the last frontier of emerging markets? If you don’t count North Korea, that is. Maybe not everyone’s choice of place to do business, but you might be surprised. Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, the Cubans tried to keep the flame of socialism burning, only to find themselves almost starving without the help of the massive Soviet subsidies they had enjoyed. Plan B from 1995 was...

By Valentina Magri Lowered rates were expected, but Mario Draghi made them real. On 5th June 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) set a 0.15 per cent intervention rate and a minus 0.1 per cent rate on banks’ deposits. But this time, the ECB has taken also unconventional measures to address deflation and credit crunch. One of them, labelled as TLTRO, is “copied from the Bank of England’s Funding for Lending Scheme”, as Martin Wolf wrote on the “Financial Times”....

By Guy Dorrell @GuyDorrellEsq Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, interviewed on Sky News’ Murnaghan programme spoke about the risks to UK economic recovery in particular "those risks that centre in the housing market”. He was referring to the potential for overheating of a market with plenty of demand – much of it fuelled by foreign investment – but with a supply side providing half the stock of new builds compared with his native Canada. Average asking...

  By Dan Ebanks Behavioural economics has been the emerging  ‘movement’ within the economics discipline for quite a few years, entering the public consciousness in 2008 with the publication of Thaler and Sunstein’s now omnipresent ‘Nudge’. However, Tim Adams suggested, in his article in the Guardian (May 31st 2014), that its demise is imminent. Until relatively recently behavioural economics had made slow and largely unnoticed progress. This may be as a result of the split in the behavioural economics camp....

By Haridos Apostolides, US Correspondent The end of April saw the proposed federal minimum wage increase to $10.10 per hour defeated by a Republican-led filibuster in the United States’ Senate, all because it is claimed not to be the job of the federal government to decide salaries. The vote, however, wasn’t about giving millions of working Americans a pay raise but rather to decide if the Senate should merely discuss whether they deserve one. Democrats and Republicans live for divisive, partisan...

By Paul Johnson The government has lauded the recent economic recovery and ‘rebalancing the economy’ has been one of the popular phrases of the Coalition. But 80 per cent of new private sector jobs are in London (Centre for Cities, 2014) and many people in the North are not feeling the effects of the recent economic recovery. One of the reasons the pre-2008 model of economic growth failed is that the UK relied too heavily on public and private borrowing...

By Jack Peat, Editor of The London Economic  “I'm going to start a revolution from my bed” – Noel Gallagher Greece is the birthplace of most good ideas. From science to technology, athletics to democracy, it has long nurtured great minds and great concepts, and it was a Greek sunset in early July last year that set in motion ideas that would become The London Economic. The plan was to make a digital newspaper that would become a platform for...

By Valentina Magri “When the going gets tough, the tough gets going”, said Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the US president JFK. But what happens when the credit gets tough? Credit crunch in the UK The word “credit crunch” was unknown to most of the Brits until 9 August 2007, “the day that world changed”, according to Adam Applegarth, chief executive at the British bank Northern Rock. On that day, the French investment bank BNP Paripas stated that they will...

By Adam Walker, Economics Correspondent A common misconception, often inferred in political and economic debate, is that the United Kingdom ranks in the top five or ten positions for socio-economic factors across the board. The UK has been an economic and political superpower for years and currently ranks as the 6th largest global economy with an estimated value of £1.5 trillion in 2013. However, how competitive are we for other factors such as education, democracy and currency strength? Do we maintain these...