Health and safety – Dangerous things conkers? Whilst walking this weekend in the pretty town of Wansford, Northants, I managed to slip on a couple of conkers. It reminded me of the story that, due to health and safety fears,…
Pokemon deja vu The second coming of over one hundred catchable Pokemon as a phone app has created a lot of excitement. And ‘Pokemon Go’ has sent the blogosphere into full hyperbolic overdrive. I have to admit that even I’ve…
Letter to The Times, 24th June 2016 ‘Sir, It is now surely unthinkable that we can continue to call our country the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The only thing uniting us is our currency. Perhaps Poundland…
Stressed Out While the main media is consumed with the economics of Bremain versus Brexit, I am going to return to the topic of ‘negative interest rates’. It’s important to understand that, whatever the outcome of the referendum, that…
A Song For Europe A long time ago in a bar far, far away (Yokohama actually) a former colleague introduced me to a song called ‘The cow kicked Nelly in the belly in the barn’. The attraction of the song,…
Why the ECB has decided to stop issuing the 500 euro banknote by the end of 2018 Lost between the Panama Papers revelations and this week’s anti-corruption summit in London was the news that the European Central Bank (ECB) would…
Great Scott!! – It’s the week of ‘Back To The Future Day’, the date in the second movie that they travel to in the Doc’s DeLorean – which, incidentally, doubles as the perfect retirement planning tool as he spends much…
In the first of these two blog posts, I highlighted how good and bad economic events are much more likely than you might expect. And this is partly due to the way the economic world is wired. There is a…
This is the first of two blogs that will show you why it is a small world after all. The world and its economy is far more connected that you might imagine. And while that does have some negative consequences,…
If I said to you the word ‘Vix’, chances are you would be thinking that I was talking about ‘Vaporub’. However, in this case I am referring to one way in which we measure how ‘fearful’ financial markets are. Not…