Russia’s by now well known demographic problems are not, IMHO, going to leave us in peace, the danger is always going to be there of a nasty political evolution which we will in the end have to sit up and take notice of. One of the many possibilities seems to take the form of the [...]

Just when he’s left the FT concludes that Schroder’s labour market reforms are in fact working. It is perhaps worth bearing in mind that although the German economy is producing a lot of jobs, a very high proportion of these are temporary.
Controversial labour market reforms introduced in Germany by Gerhard Schröder in 2004 are showing [...]

Revolting High Rises
Le Corbusier called houses “machines for living.” France’s housing projects, as we now know, became machines for alienation. In theory, the cause of this alienation is some mix of the buildings themselves and the way they’re joined to the city. But in practice, the most effective urban renewal has tended to focus on [...]

You will likely have heard by now that George Best — Northern Ireland international, star of Manchester United and, later, player for a long list of increasingly obscure clubs — has died. Best was a weak and pitiable alcoholic, and also one of the greatest footballers ever to grace a pitch. My own thoughts on [...]

The Italian government finally agreed the details of the new penison reform yesterday. Curiously, it does not need to go to parliament for approval. Getting government agreement had not been without difficulty, and again interestingly enough it won’t come into effect for two years, giving next year’s incoming government plenty of time to [...]

This link is not exactly recent, but it is a reasonably good summary of something.

The idea that there was a global savings glut now having gone out of fashion, some are presently arguing that what we have is an investment dearth (my own view is that these two effectively mean the same thing, since the issue is a relational one). More evidence for this investment dearth hypothesis comes today [...]

Well, the Antonio Fazio question seems definitely to have decided that it doesn’t want to go away. The FT today informs us that the European Commission will take legal action before the end of the year against Italy over the allegations that against Fazio ( governor of the Bank of Italy). This threat is, [...]

The New Yorker: The Critics: Books
Still, “Postwar” can fairly be called an interpretation of European history since 1945, and its thesis can be put in a sentence. It is that Europe was able to rebuild itself politically and economically only by forgetting the past, but it was able to define itself morally and culturally only [...]

In comments here, Edward has addressed a question I was also thinking about this morning. He writes, “So the new coalition’s ‘play’ will be to try and really push-start domestic consumption in 2006. Obviously they hope some consumption will be brought forward in order to avoid the tax.”
Tax and a positive contribution from the ECB [...]