The FT’s just sent out an email saying: Three of the eurozone’s five largest economies will bust through EU-mandated deficit limits this year as the bloc’s recession continues to deepen, according to highly anticipated European Commission forecasts published on Friday. In addition to the anticipated breaches by France, Spain and the Netherlands, the currency union’s
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These are two opening paragraphs in FT stories today: It is hard to believe the European Central Bank will not cut interest rates on Thursday. Governing council members came perilously close at their last meeting, in early April. Since then, eurozone unemployment has surged and inflation has tumbled to a three-year low of 1.2 per cent –
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The Guardian notes this morning that: George Osborne has warned the Bank of England that it risks derailing Britain’s fragile economy if it uses tough new financial watchdog powers to clamp down too hard on the City. The chancellor told the Bank’s governor on Tuesday that Threadneedle Street’s new financial policy committee (FPC) should take account of the impact of its
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As the FT reports this morning: [In Ireland] evictions are expected to rise after the EU, ECB and IMF insisted banks repossess more houses. One in five mortgages in Ireland have serious mortgage arrears. Now in normal times, with buoyant house prices and liquid mortgage markets the solution is to evict, sell the house on,
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As the FT notes this morning: The Netherlands and Luxembourg had booked foreign direct investment of $5.8tn by the end of 2012 – more than the US, UK and Germany combined, according to data that will fuel controversy over aggressive corporate tax policies. With the G20 pledging to crack down on multinational tax avoidance the
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Ivan Horrocks, for whose thinking I have much regard, wrote this as a comment on the blog this morning, responding to the story about the Public Accounts Committee criticising the role of the Big 4 in creating tax policy. I thought it worth sharing with a broader audience that a post gets: I’ve been waiting for the PAC to catch up with
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In the CLASS think tank paper that Howard Reed and I have written that reconsideres Beveridge’s concept of idleness in a 21st century frameowrk we argue that: Tax is, indisputably, the most important way in which any government intervenes in an economy. This inevitably means that when considering how a government is to tackle idleness, as is
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From Philip Stephens in the FT this morning: What circumstance now demands of politicians is the confidence to break free of the defunct, and debunked, economic theorising. Economists are not always wrong; nor does the real problem lie with dodgy data. The mistake comes when policy makers invest the findings of a faith-based discipline with
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In the executive summary of the report on delivering full employment that Howard Reed and I have written for the CLASS think tank we argue that there are at least five good reasons for tackling unemployment and seeking full employment: There is no doubt that Beveridge saw idleness as the curse of unemployment that had afflicted so many
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