Edmund Conway

[https://i0.wp.com/www.edmundconway.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/eurobalances.gif?ssl=1] Mario Draghi and other eurozone policymakers like to point out from time to time that the euro is in good shape because unlike the US or UK it doesn’t have a current account deficit

You have to hand it to them: European finance ministers have done a remarkable job of not fouling things up recently. They’ve managed (for the time being at least) to string together a sequence of summits ending not in discord and recrimination but in broad-based agreement. They’ve taken

A few years ago Britain’s standard of living used to be the highest in the Europe Union (save for Luxembourg, which is, anyway, a bit of a statistical anomaly).  Today it has dropped down beneath Germany and  Austria, and looks likely to continue falling. Eurostat measures something called Actual

There’s nothing very new about the idea that a central bank could target nominal GDP rather than inflation. Sir Samuel Brittan has been lobbying for this since before the Bank of England was made independent; Giles Wilkes, now Vince Cable’s special advisor, wrote a compelling paper proposing it

I was a little bemused this morning to hear the latest unemployment figures [http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/december-2012/statistical-bulletin.html] being touted by cabinet ministers as the best in a decade. Granted: they’re pretty solid, and they show that the labour market is continuing

According to the Office for National Statistics there are now over a million households in England and Wales where English (or Welsh for households in Wales) is not the household’s main language. The data is from the 2011 Census. [https://i0.wp.com/www.edmundconway.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/