I am happy to be back here at AFOE with a guest post. For those of you don’t know me my name is Claus Vistesen and I write regularly from my personal blog Alpha.Sources. In my writings I usually stay within the comfortable world of the dismal science and this post is no exception. Today’s [...]

My co-blogger on Global Economy Matters Manuel Alvarez in his post on last weekend’s Spanish election called it “Zapatero’s election to lose”, meaning by this that the opposition scarcely seemed credibly poised to win, and their best chance of victory rested on the possibility that Spain’s Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero might somehow or [...]

As I have just indicated in my last post Hungarians went to the polls yesterday in a vote over whether or not to scrap government-imposed fees on visits to doctors and hospitals introduced as part of a belt-tightening adjustment programme, designed to bring what was at the time of its introduction [...]

Question: how would you have known they were holding a referendum on the government’s difficult and unpopular economic adjustment package in Hungary on Sunday? Answer: just take a look at what happened in the Hungarian financial markets last Friday.
It should not have been too difficult to see all this coming, yet financial analysts [...]

Karl Marx said that ideology is part of the social superstructure, merely a decorative overlay on the brutal truth of the economic base. Millian liberalism was really just an expression of the pounding steam engines, Jacquard looms and downtrodden apprentices of 1840s Manchester, just as absolutism had been built on the assumption that society would [...]

John Quiggin writes about the banking crisis:
Suppose Bank A owes a trillion dollars to bank B which in turn owes a trillion to C which in turn owes a trillion to D which owes a trillion to A. Now suppose that A gets into liquidity trouble and can’t pay. Then B is similarly in trouble [...]

Surfing around the internet looking for more information on ecological economics I came across the Ecological Economics weblog and a podcast by Josh Farley, assistant professor at the University of Vermont. In his podcast Farley talks about the unsustainability of the concept of indefinite economic growth: Beyond economic growth by Josh Farley.
I post this [...]

Spanish banks borrowed up to EUR 44 billion in December from the European Central Bank, “replacing banks’ use of wholesale capital markets, which have been strangled by the global credit crunch,” writes today’s FT. Furthermore, “The Spanish banking system is second only to the UK in Europe in its use of mortgage-backed bond makrets and [...]

Is doomed to be overtaken by the tech-fuelled surgeosity of US vitality, right?
Well, perhaps. Where would you decide to put a factory for the mass-production of Li-Ion batteries, the key technology in getting oil out of cars? California? China? Brazil? Try France: that’s what Johnson Controls is doing. Or how about launching 150kg satellites into [...]

Parag Khanna has a monster screed - eight pages - in the NYT on the subject of “turning away from hegemony”. The hegemony concerned is that of the United States; the argument is that US power will decline relative to that of China, India, big second-tier powers, and Europe. This is a topic that cannot [...]