Work is a perished good
November 13, 2019Full time work for a fixed salary has only existed for around a hundred years, and still not for everyone, as women were deprived of it for a good while, including during the happy times of full employment in the second half of last century. Today, deregulation, outsourcing and automation are all synonymous with…
Negative rates: an economic curse?
November 6, 2019Companies that don’t pay interests on their debt are a like these students who never sit an exam: they somehow scrape by without any notable successes or accomplishments. The current level of rates should be encouraging investment because companies’ margins are much higher than the cost of capital, that is itself negligible. Even the…
Economists: can we trust them?
October 28, 2019Chile is the only Latin American country that is a member of the OECD, and not long ago it was still being cited as an example to follow because of its success and economic recovery. It is, however, just the latest victim to date of a neoliberalism whose ravages have now become universal. Chile’s fall…
Inflation of prices, deflation of policies
October 10, 2019So you think you understand inflation? Allow me to correct you because it is in no way the result of an unreasonable expansion of the money supply that translates into a rise in prices. This clichéd term of “inflation”, used unscrupulously by the detractors of central banks, by the prophets of misfortune whose commercial stock…
Lebanon: how can it avoid self-destruction?
October 1, 2019I just got back from Lebanon, a country that I know well and where I was born, where the atmosphere is now as palpable as it was during the dark days of the civil war. Admittedly, it’s not the armed conflicts that threaten, though this nation remains a hostage – often consentingly – to…
The economic deficiencies of our political leaders
September 17, 2019The “Japanisation” of our Western economies that I have been talking about and describing for years has now reached its climax with the world’s two most influential central banks – the ECB and the Fed – getting (back) out the heavy artillery in the hope of putting more pressure on their interest rates. The heated…
The People against the Economists
September 9, 2019In his time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt dismissed John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential and brilliant economists of the 20th century, who was labelled an “unorthodox mathematician” by this president. In his farewell address, Eisenhower had warned his citizens against the technocrats in power, the same who were recently described by Emmanuel Macron…
Compliance, Banks in a changing world
September 3, 2019The rise to power of compliance departments in banks can be explained by the fines imposed by regulators and Western, mainly American, judiciaries. After the 9/11 attacks, after the “Patriot Act”, and after the US sanctions on Iran, Russia, certain Mexican agents and anyone who the US unilaterally and in an instant decries as…
Italy: how to decimate a country in less than 20 years
July 26, 2019In 1960, Italy’s GDP was 15% smaller than France’s, and 27% lower than the average of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and France’s combined. However, this country enjoyed steady growth until the start of the 1990s as Italian household income caught up with the period’s norm for the other eurozone nations, so much so that…
Central banker: extinction of the species
July 9, 2019“Of course our central bank is independent”, the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, pretty much just declared, just before dismissing by presidential decree (on 7th July) the boss of Turkey’s central bank, Murat Cetinkaya, stating that “a central bank cannot ignore the signals sent by the President”. It was in the last century and…
