We cannot deny the emotions that bring tears to the surface. The only thing we can change is how we cope with everything that’s happening. [Read More...]
The reality behind fiscal scare stories, or mediamacro is alive and well
If you listen to the broadcast media, you will have almost certainly picked up the message that at some point in the near future the Chancellor is going to have to raise taxes or cut spending to ‘pay for’ all the support to the economy during the pandemic. At least the Financial Times has learnt the lesson of 2010, and notesin this editorial that the Chancellor“must hold the line and resist attempts to push the UK into a premature fiscal retrenchment. Cutting spending in the middle of the worst recession since the creation of the country would be a historic blunder and make Britain poorer in the long run through unnecessary unemployment and business failure.” If only they had said the same in 2010. But they add “Eventually … [Read More...]
Now is not the time?
This post was written before the Sunday Times article on 19th April, and has been slightly changed as a result. The most serious failings of the government were already known to anyone who had the inclination to look. Rather than looking at the time line, this piece looks at the types of mistake made. We keep hearing the phrase in the title (without the question mark), particularly but not only from those sympathetic to this government. Now is not the time to talk about what could have been done given hindsight. Instead we need to focus on saving lives. You could see why this might be true. Resources are finite, and we would rather politicians were focusing on getting things done right now rather than defending themselves … [Read More...]
Business Breakfast Podcast (Episode 73)
OANDA Senior Market Analyst Craig Erlam previews the day’s business and market news with Jazz FM Business Breakfast presenter Michael Wilson. This morning they discussed the new rules on social gatherings in the UK, sterling decline as Boris Johnson stirs tensions with Brussels, ECB meeting and the latest tech moves. [Read More...]
The economic effects of a pandemic
A little over ten years ago I was approached by some health experts who wanted to look at the economic effects of a influenza pandemic. They needed someone with a macroeconomic model to look at the general equilibrium impacts. In the 1990s I had led a small team that constructeda model called COMPACT, and these health experts and I completed a paper that was subsequently publishedin Health Economics. We reference to other studies that had been done earlier in that paper.The current coronavirus outbreak will have different characteristics to the pandemic we studied, and hopefully it will not become a pandemic at all. (In terms of mortality it seems to be somewhere in between the ‘base case’ and ‘severe case’ we looked at in our work…. [Read More...]
Why the media in UK and US has moved beyond manufacturing consent, and why that has led to a war about reporting COVID-19
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (hereafter MC) was a book published by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in 1988. From my point of view the key idea behind MC was that media organisations select the news and opinion that they show to viewers in a way that supports the existing economic, social and political system. This could be summed up as saying the mainstream media (MSM) is not subversive. The book talks about the “propaganda model for manufacturing consent” as involving various elements: the ownership structure and for profit goal, the importance of advertising, the importance of particular news sources, sensitivity to organised criticism, and organising filters like the cold war or terrorism. So, for example, in my idea of mediamacro you see the … [Read More...]