With fundamentally important elections for Greece on the horizon, everyone from the Greeks to the Germans must work out where they stand on the issue of “Grexit” (the potential departure of Greece from the Eurozone). The subject has become a contentious issue once again, in light of indications from the polls that radical left wing […]
Eight years after the first bank in the eurozone failed and was bailed out by the German government, the eurozone is still in a dreadful mess. Catastrophic policy mistakes have transformed a financial crisis into a much deeper economic and political one. The economy is stagnating: it grew by a mere 0.8% in the year […]
Another day, another survey showing just how low trust in business has fallen. This has been a consistent theme for commentators and policy wonks since the crash of 2008. For some people, it was an important area even before the Great Recession. The problem, however, is that businesses (and pro-business advocates) have accepted this as […]
The increase in anti-corruption campaigns in Brazil can be dated to 2005 when former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s top aides were accused of paying legislators to support and enforce their bills. This unleashed a series of investigations into the activities of Brazil’s economic and political elite, revealing endemic corruption: in Sao Paulo, 33 […]
Pe-what? Only three months ago, the combination “Pegida” would have looked like a bad-luck leftover set of letters in a Scrabble game. Widely known today, the acronym stands for “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident”. An outgrowth of a Facebook group, this self-declared civil movement in the eastern German city of Dresden attracts […]
A recurrent debate among historians is the question: can history teach us lessons relevant to the present and future? Generally, history does not repeat itself by turning full circle, though it may move elliptically. Economic history, however, may be a special case in that it travels in recognisable cycles – boom, recession, depression, recovery – […]
Do you want to buy Fildena online? On this page you can see where you can order this medication without a prescription previously obtained from your doctor. Safe, reliable and discreet. This medication belongs to an antibiotic drug for the treatment of respiratory infections and ear infections and is considered safe by several doctors to […]
There are two coalitions in Britain today. The one in power in Whitehall between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. We all know about that one. Much less discussed is the more informal but still powerful coalition between Conservative ministers and the Labour leaders of northern England’s great cities. More devolution of power to these cities […]
What? In 2011, the Swiss Central Bank placed a cap of 1.20 Swiss francs per euro in order to prevent the appreciation of the currency and protect Swiss exports. Today, the bank abandoned its peg to the euro in a shock move, despite SNB president Thomas Jordan promising ” to defend [the peg] with utmost […]
The leader of the opposition in Britain used to have a little routine he went through whenever an opponent said anything he disagreed with. He would shake his head slowly, as though the gesture was being undertaken more in sorrow than in anger, and then slowly he would utter the dreaded phrase: “He… just… doesn’t… […]
How can Scandinavians tax so much? This is the question that Henrik Jacobsen Kleven, professor of Economics at London School of Economics, explores in a new paper. The author gives a number of valuable insights. To begin with, Scandinavian welfare policies are not as progressively tilted towards income distribution as foreign observers might assume. Much […]
France, according to its prime minister, Manuel Valls, is “at war” with Islamism. And not just France. “Europe is under siege,” say American media. The Chairman of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, broadened the geography still further, talking of “a war on Western civilization”. It’s natural, in the aftermath of an atrocity, to cast […]
The recent attacks in Paris against the well-known satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, and a Jewish grocery store have been qualified as “Islamic terror”. This seems to me an hasty qualification, confusing the ideological label used by the criminals themselves and who they really were. Above all, they were criminals and nothing more. To proclaim, as […]
Karen Horn delivers a sharp, acid and merciless critique of the German liberals’ attempt at initiating a revival after their disastrous defeat in the federal elections in September 2013. On the credit side, she discovers virtually nothing. Apart from the rhetorical talents of the party’s leader Christian Lindner, she discards the rest of the current […]
Former Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa may have suffered a surprise defeat last week at the hands of his former ally Maithripala Sirisena, but there is no doubt that the economy flourished under his control. Despite being beset by constant national, environmental, political and social disasters over the past half century, Sri Lanka has proved to […]
The Tories know that commuters hate being held to ransom by transport strikers, they know that union bashing polls well with their target voters and puts Labour’s Ed Miliband, the leader of a union-financed opposition party, on the side of his sponsor’s vested interests and the wrong side of most voters. So much for the low […]
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