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Edmund Conway

A quick rant about the unemployment figures

This might sound counter-intuitive, given everyone (the ONS included [http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/may-2013/index.html] ) is proclaiming that today’s labour market data showed a rise in unemployment, but the reality is that the jobless total actually dropped A LOT in the most recent

Sir Mervyn King and his troubled legacy

It was a demob-happy Sir Mervyn King who appeared at the Bank of England today for his final ever Inflation Report. He joked with a Slovenian journalist to “come and join the Sterling area!” He threw in one or two football jokes. He even had time to lob some acid

The G7 and the "spirit of 2008"

Here’s how international finance ministers’ meetings like the G7 usually work: the ministers, central bankers and a few other VIPs like the head of the International Monetary Fund get together in a room. Usually one without windows. They each read out a pre-prepared opening statement, each of which can

What happens to banks when the economy is uncooperative

It’s very easy to dismiss the Moody’s downgrade of the Co-operative Bank today – after all, who pays attention to ratings agencies these days? That is, until you look at the details of the downgrade notice. Moody’s has dropped the rating on the Co-op’s debt not by

GDP: finally, some good news

Let’s get the provisos out of the way first. One quarter’s numbers do not a recovery make. The UK economy is still far from what anyone would regard as healthy. National income is still more than 2.5% below where it was back at the start of 2008.

Funding for what?

If you’ve ever wondered how it is that despite getting things so monumentally wrong over the past five years, economists still manage to find work, a brief glance at the newly-refreshed Funding for Lending scheme might enlighten you. Here is a scheme which, according to most external analysts has

What's really going on with the public finances

When he was Shadow Chancellor, one of George Osborne’s favourite criticisms of the then Chancellor Gordon Brown was that under him the tax system had become so complex that Tolley’s Tax Handbook, the Bible of tax measures, had doubled in length to over 11,500 pages. In an