Ed Conway

The Chancellor said recently that he expected that by 2030 the UK would be a bigger economy than Germany. If so, that would be the first time since the 1950s, as this chart above shows. And here’s the same chart, in terms of GDP per capita (eg adjusted for

The Institute for Fiscal Studies’ big annual report, which surveys the state of the UK economy and public finances, came out this morning. It’s a chunky document, which can be downloaded here [http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/7530] , but if you’re after a digested read, here are

If you want a good illustration of the difficulties facing Yanis Varoufakis with his innovative idea for sorting out Greece’s debt problems, think back to Britain’s difficulty with the EU Budget late last year [http://news.sky.com/story/1369482/osborne-claims-real-win-over-1-7bn-eu-bill]. You’ll recall that George Osborne was

Here follows some of the background thoughts behindmy column in today’s Times [http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4342328.ece]. You’d probably guess that the single biggest sector of the UK economy is retail. What you might not have realised is that it has very nearly

Here’s how weird things are getting: in Denmark there are now some mortgages with negative interest rates. In other words, banks are paying customers to lend them money. Odd things like this happen when you cut interest rates below zero, as they did in Copenhagen the other week. This

Or ever, most probably. Today the UK Government’s benchmark rate of interest hit 1.4%. That’s the lowest it’s been in quite some time. A very, very long time, in fact. The Bank of England has stats on this going back to 1703, the year Sir Isaac