Japanification of China
August 29, 2024Extended periods of deflation, economic stagnation, a declining real estate market, financial pressure and stress impacting households, businesses, and the state. All signals suggesting credible parallels between today’s China and Japan in the 1990s. China risks becoming an aging and heavily indebted country before it becomes a wealthy nation. The Japanese population only…
The Soviet and European Unions: same lies, same destiny
April 4, 2017The parallels between the European Union of 2017 and the Soviet Union of 1989 are troubling. Didn’t these two systems pride themselves on being “apolitical”, meaning that they were led by a technocratic elite that was detached from real life and “real people”? Faced with economic stagnation, didn’t these two systems react by calling on…
The politics of paralysed puppets
March 28, 2017Globalisation didn’t force States to implement divisive public policies which have exacerbated inequalities and jammed the social ladder. The choice made by our successive governments to enact massive deregulation was deliberate, leaving the market as the sole arbiter of individual liberties and as the only generator of wealth and opportunity, albeit too often a source…
Choose your poison
April 7, 2016“The essence of secular stagnation: sick recoveries which die in their infancy and depressions which feed on themselves and leave a hard and seemingly immovable core of unemployment.” It is in these terms that the father of secular stagnation, Alvin Hansen, described to the American Economic Association the economic climate of 1938…which could just as…
The preordained disappearance of cash
February 29, 2016In Sweden, the Church has had to adapt because its followers are carrying less and less cash around with them. It has therefore now become commonplace for churches in places like Stockholm to display their bank details on giant screens during Sunday services, so that church-goers can whip out their phones and make an instant…
Economic Hibernation
February 25, 2016How have we lost our bearings? And why do the right and left – in all Western countries – appear to be applying the same economic policy, with only a few cosmetic nuances in difference? Where are the contentions of old that we used to have and which would pit us against each other? It…