Yesterday evening the Festival of Economics 2014 kicked off with the author John Lanchester in conversation with Izabella Kaminska of the FT. Lanchester, who is promoting his book How to speak money, had some very interesting and important things to say about the language of finance. His key […]
Mark Carney’s speech yesterday to an Inclusive Capitalism conference has attracted plenty of press coverage. And rightly so. It is a fascinating speech. But it is not necessarily fascinating for the arguments it sets out. The arguments are familiar. It is fascinating because it is Carney who is making […]
A little late in the day I’ve just finished Adair Turner’s Economics after the crisis: objectives and means, published in 2012. It is based on Turner’s 2010 Lionel Robbins lectures. Economics after the crisis is a thoughtful book which makes a number of relatively simple but profound points. The […]
A couple of weeks ago Martin Wolf blogged on the way in which modern macroeconomics has neglected the explicit and integrated treatment of the financial sector. The consequences of this omission have turned out to be of enormous practical significance. It left analysis mostly blind to a range […]
Is financial innovation a good thing or a bad thing? Is it possible to tell in advance? Some might recall Warren Buffett’s comments in 2003, when he characterised derivatives as financial weapons of mass destruction, and suggest that perhaps it is. We know that novel, complex and non-transparent […]
The debate over the future organisation and operation of the banking industry seems to have spluttered back into life. Just before Christmas the first report of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards made its appearance. The report focused on structures. Its most eye-catching and newsworthy recommendation was that […]
Over Christmas I went back to Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization and Welfare by Andrew Glyn. It is simultaneously a sparse and a sprawling book. The text has fewer than 190 pages, and yet it covers an immense amount of territory. I returned to the book to look for […]
The audacity of Barclays’ actions in seeking to manipulate LIBOR is not in doubt. The scandal, quite apart from exposing how odious and unethical some of Barclays’ business practices were under Bob Diamond, has exposed profound weaknesses in the microstructures of financial markets. These weaknesses should not come […]
[Originally posted at Dale&Co, 30/06/12] My first reaction on hearing the news that the FSA has fined Barclays for a piece of sharp practice was little more than a raised eyebrow. After all, it’s hardly the first time. We’ve become rather inured to it. It was only in […]
How often do you encounter something important and find yourself thinking “how is it that I didn’t know about this already?”. It happened to me last week when reading an FT piece (£) by Gillian Tett on the flash crash experienced by the US equities market in May […]
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