Now this is really interesting. The Grauniad talks to some drug dealers about how they use bookies’ video roulette machines to launder their earnings. The main reason to do this is that they issue receipts, which permit you to explain to the police (and also the Revenue) why you’re carrying so much cash. It’s also…
Read More A case study in cluster spillover from the financial services sectorSo, back in March we were transitioning towards a low-trust society via the phenomenon of the bogus hairdresser. I identified a maximum at the chilly limit of 1.16 million people who might be kept off the official unemployment number via Work Programme wipe-your-own-arse classes, zero wage placements, or bogus hairdressing. I didn’t believe it was…
Read More The missing millions, found hairdressingThis is quite impressive – a very short blog post that explains the Marxist idea of reification in neoclassical economic terms of equilibrium, game theory, and collective-action problems. I think I now know what it means. A case for Help to Buy. Most of the work in it is either done by the notion that…
Read More Some economic linksChris Dillow loves the idea that there is nothing in industrialised economies worth investing in, and there hasn’t been for years. As far as I can see, the evidence for this is a quote from Ben Bernanke in 2005 that might have been included in his speech by heaven knows what PR flack. But I…
Read More Demand determines income. It does so through investmentVia Simon Wren-Lewis‘s blog. You see the flattish bit from 2002 to 2008? When people like Hopi Sen talk about “spending out of control”, that’s the bit they mean. This is some weird use of the word “control”, huh? In fact, the only period on the chart where the budget wasn’t either busting or booming…
Read More Look after unemployment and…Econospeak has been having a debate about whether aggregate supply/aggregate demand models are actually any use in economics, which is important because pretty much everyone who does a macroeconomics class gets taught them, like me. One of the things I remember being dissatisfied with was how to reconcile the long-run aggregate supply curve with the…
Read More Green FriedmanI don’t read Hopi Sen but apparently he reads me, as evidenced by this blog post regarding the idea of a “fiscal policy council” analogous to the monetary policy committee, but with a substantially wider remit and membership. I can remember when this was floated in the late 90s in a wave of cheer about…
Read More The troika in one countryTo expand on something I wrote as a comment, one of the things I hate about wizard privatisation schemes and especially “total outsourcing” or whatever is as follows. The FSTA deal for the RAF’s new jet tankers is especially awful and exemplary. Here’s the idea. Rather than buy the aeroplanes and do the job, we’ll…
Read More Railtrack in the sky, at war!A short post. Here Mises.org. Here Keynes.org. This is unsatisfactory. Even if no-one’s going to build a shiny new website (and why not?), shouldn’t it at least point at something useful? Update – Thanks, David! Keynes for Kids, the economic version of the Children’s Illustrated Clausewitz.
Read More keynes.org considered insufficientGavin Kelly argues that it doesn’t much matter, from a practical point of view, what the Eds decide about the coming spending review. It covers 2015 and 2016, and administratively speaking changing it wouldn’t have much impact before the end of the financial year in April, 2016. After all, the Tories and the Lib Dems…
Read More Faster, please.