As Manuel points out in the accompanying post, Romano Prodi’s resignation as Italy’s Prime Minister is a rather sudden and dramatic, but scarcely unexpected, development. The immediate political crisis may be resolved as rapidly as it appeared, but again as Manuel indicates it may only serve as a prelude for further things to come, and [...]

When scientific paradigms collide everyone should duck, at least that is the best advice I can offer at the present moment. The provisional German retail sales for January are now in, and they don’t make especially pleasant reading:
“European retail sales dropped for the first time in 10 months in January as spending in Germany [...]

Morgan Stanley team members Steven Jen and Eric Chaney (joined by Takehiro Sato and David Miles) debate today the interesting question of whether the eurozone economies have entered a liquidity trap (LT). Those who have no idea what one of these would look like could do worse than read Paul Krugman’s classic article on the [...]

This is a very convenient moment to put up this post. Alan Greenspan has just admitted that he’s human like the rest of us, and that he doesn’t have a very good explanation for why long-term interest rates have been falling at a time when he and his Fed colleagues have been busy raising [...]

Views of immigration are changing. Back in the mists of time, when I first came to the conclusion that ongoing demographic changes were going to be important, the voices in favour of a reconsideration of immigration policy were few and far between. Perhaps the first and most notable of these voices was the UN population [...]

The ECB met earlier today to conduct the monthly review of interest rate policy. It came as a surprise to noone that the outcome was to leave everything just as it is. Surprisingly though the decision this month is surrounded by a little more controversy than has been the case of late since Italy’s Berlusconi [...]

Well I suppose it’s better to end the week on a bang rather than a whimper, so here I go with another of those posts. What really ended the week on a high note (or should I say a low one) was the US labour market. And since I am arguing that the euro-dollar parity [...]

By 2050 Western Europe could be an economic irrelevancy, with its four leading economies, the UK, Germany, France and Italy (note the order?) enjoying a combined output of less than half India?s and a third of China?s. Both Brazil and Russia will be twice as large as any single Western European economy.

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