Currently a number of attempts are being made to claim a major revival of US industry is taking place. For example Harold L. Sirkin, of the Boston Consulting Group, writes: ‘A resurgence of U.S. manufacturing seems to be in the offing. With production costs rising in China, some companies are bringing their manufacturing back to the [...]

There is much to dislike in the former IMF chief economists Peter Boone and Simon Johnson’s prognosis The European Crisis Deepens about the prospects for the Eurozone, particularly one of the three parts of their recommended solution being much deeper austerity for the next 10 years in countries like Ireland. Their assessment is inevitably a [...]

Bob Dylan could have been writing about these times when he composed the lyrics ‘the times they are a changing’. This was never so apparent than on a recent trip to the US to meet  with social and economic justice organisations.
Most striking was the shift in the parameters of the public debate about wealth, income [...]

The magnitude of the blow suffered by the UK economy since the beginning of the financial crisis is very considerably minimized by not presenting it in terms of a common international yardstick. Gauged by decline in GDP, using a common international purchasing measure, dollars, no other economy in the world has shrunk even remotely as [...]

The hugely impartial Frances Ruane of the ESRI was a former non-executive director of Depfa Bank, which was based in the IFSC and which collapsed in 2008, costing the German taxpayer, via its forced ownership of Hypo Real Estate, well over 100 billion euro. The ‘hands-off’ regulation of the IFSC was key to Depfa’s business [...]

There’s nothing wrong with saying, hey I got it wrong.  We all get something wrong from time to time; never more so when the subject matter is economic and fiscal forecasting.  When people and institutions don’t admit they got it wrong, especially when they got it demonstrably wrong, when the policies they are advocating are [...]