Edmund Conway

You’ve heard of optical illusions; well prepare yourself for a statistical illusion. Earlier this morning, the Office for National Statistics reported that unemployment had fallen [http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_297429.pdf]. That is the headline most news organisations have run with [http://www.guardian.co.uk/

For me, the most significant thing anyone in economics said in the past week was an apparently throwaway remark from Sir Mervyn King at the end of his Inflation Report [http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/inflationreport/2013/ir1301.aspx] press conference (emphasis mine): There is enormous uncertainty out

That’s right, even the horse meat saga does, inevitably, come down to economics. One of the main rules of the subject is that if something goes up in price, people will tend to substitute for alternative goods. That goes for individuals and for businesses. And it so happens that

You can tell when Sir Mervyn King wants to make a point: he throws in a football analogy. He did it a decade ago, warning that changing the Bank’s inflation target was like “moving the goalposts [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1449135/Change-in-price-index-could-hit-wage-rises.html] ” during a free

More or less every week a small group of senior officials from seven finance ministries and central banks around the world hold a very special teleconference. The contents of these secure G7 finance calls are confidential; they rarely issue a statement, unless they want to say something they judge to

[https://i0.wp.com/www.edmundconway.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/carney.jpg?ssl=1] Here’s what we learnt about the incoming Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, in his testimony before MPs at the Treasury Select Committee today, in more or less descending order of importance. 1. This