Economics

  By Valentina Magri “Money doesn’t make you happy” is the typical saying that you state when you want to raise the spirit of people dissatisfied with their personal finances. But if you live in the UK, you should forget it, cash is king. Money and happiness Basically, there are two main views over the link between money and happiness. According to Easterlin, happiness comes from money until a saturation point (Easterlin paradox). Once you overcome this boundary, the correlation...

By Rachel Wilson Political Reporter The current cuts to the public sector look set to impact on women the hardest. Women make up the majority of public sector workers and cuts to the sector has pushed women’s unemployment up over the past few years. Women make up 65% of the public sector workforce in the UK and the latest figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility estimate that 929,000 jobs will be lost in the public sector by 2018. Over...

By Valentina Magri The decision of the European Council to propose Jean-Claude Juncker as the next President of the European Commission was “one step closer to quitting Europe” for Britain. The move made David Cameron feel very angry. Indeed, the PM has promised a referendum in 2017 over EU membership if the Conservative party win the 2015 general election. Opinion polls show that Brits are split on the issue. But what would be the economic consequences of Brexit? The five economic consequences...

By Simon Bartram Setting interest rates is no easy task. It would be wishful thinking to imagine that every economic effect of every economic action can be perfectly predicted. We're dealing with a multitude of different people with different circumstances, personalities and ambitions – evidently not a subject matter that can be easily tested under a microscope and certainly not a topic about which claims can be made with a scientist's precision. Not to mention that we're dealing with a...

By Phillip Oppenheim Cuba – sexy, sultry, sandy, salsa – and the last frontier of emerging markets? If you don’t count North Korea, that is. Maybe not everyone’s choice of place to do business, but you might be surprised. Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, the Cubans tried to keep the flame of socialism burning, only to find themselves almost starving without the help of the massive Soviet subsidies they had enjoyed. Plan B from 1995 was...

By Valentina Magri Lowered rates were expected, but Mario Draghi made them real. On 5th June 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) set a 0.15 per cent intervention rate and a minus 0.1 per cent rate on banks’ deposits. But this time, the ECB has taken also unconventional measures to address deflation and credit crunch. One of them, labelled as TLTRO, is “copied from the Bank of England’s Funding for Lending Scheme”, as Martin Wolf wrote on the “Financial Times”....

By Guy Dorrell @GuyDorrellEsq Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, interviewed on Sky News’ Murnaghan programme spoke about the risks to UK economic recovery in particular "those risks that centre in the housing market”. He was referring to the potential for overheating of a market with plenty of demand – much of it fuelled by foreign investment – but with a supply side providing half the stock of new builds compared with his native Canada. Average asking...

  By Dan Ebanks Behavioural economics has been the emerging  ‘movement’ within the economics discipline for quite a few years, entering the public consciousness in 2008 with the publication of Thaler and Sunstein’s now omnipresent ‘Nudge’. However, Tim Adams suggested, in his article in the Guardian (May 31st 2014), that its demise is imminent. Until relatively recently behavioural economics had made slow and largely unnoticed progress. This may be as a result of the split in the behavioural economics camp....

By Haridos Apostolides, US Correspondent The end of April saw the proposed federal minimum wage increase to $10.10 per hour defeated by a Republican-led filibuster in the United States’ Senate, all because it is claimed not to be the job of the federal government to decide salaries. The vote, however, wasn’t about giving millions of working Americans a pay raise but rather to decide if the Senate should merely discuss whether they deserve one. Democrats and Republicans live for divisive, partisan...