Politics Roundtable

Liaquat Ahmed’s Lords of Finance is somewhere between a history of the world economy between the First World War and the Great Depression and a group biography of the key central bankers of that era - Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Emile Moreau of the Banque de ...

Charlemagne, over at the Economist blog, can be… uneven. But this recent post about Greece’s public sector is IMO top notch. It puts the creation of Greece’s huge, poorly paid, inefficient public sector in historical context:

Take the painful question of the huge public sector, and all those ...

I hadn’t seen an advance release of the January German export data, when I wrote the following on Tuesday, honest injun I hadn’t:

Well, this is only a hypothesis. But if the hypothesis has any validity we should be able to make some predictions on the basis of ...

According to Bundesbank President Axel Weber, Germany’s economic recovery is “essentially intact”, and is now set to benefit from stronger demand in countries outside the euro region.

“I firmly believe that the recovery process that began in summer 2009 is essentially intact, and that it will continue despite the slower ...

OK, so it’s time for another chapter of the Strategic Defence Review as a Blog.

Chapter 2 begins as follows:

The use of force as an option is becoming more complicated. It is likely to become more difficult to use force in the way in which we have used it ...

Some comments or, perhaps better, some additions to Ed Hugh’s piece of February 26, ‘To Soon To Cry “Victory” on Latvia?’ by Morten Hansen, Stockholm School of Economics in Riga

Thanks a lot ...

Two interesting facts:

1) After sharply negative growth last year, Russia’s growth is predicted to exceed 6% this year. Okay, that’s just clawing back what they lost. But it’s still better than almost anywhere else in Eastern Europe.

2) For the first time in many, many years Russia’s ...

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There’s a dyin’ voice within me reaching out somewhere,
………….

It’
s not often that I await the ECB after-meeting press conference statements of Jean Claude Trichet ...

Global manufacturing activity continued to expand in February, albeit at a slightly weaker pace than in January. At 55.2, down slightly from 56.1 in January, the JPMorgan Global Manufacturing PMI posted its second highest reading in almost four years. The average reading so far in Q1 2010 (55.7) is above ...

According to data released today from the Swedish statistical office Sweden unexpectedly fell back into recession in the fourth quarter, adding to the impression there has been a growth dip among Europe’s economies and raising further questions about the durability of the recovery in Europe.

Gross domestic product contracted by a ...