Ed Conway

Just came across this fantastic dataset from the OECD [http://www.oecd.org/gender/data/OECD_1564_TUSupdatePortal.xls][xls] showing how people in different countries, and of different genders spend their time. I have no idea how reliable the data are, but there are a few interesting nuggets in

Quantitative easing is five years old today. Over the course of that time, monetary policy in the United Kingdom has changed beyond all recognition. The reason why is summed up in the chart below. Back in the pre-QE days, the majority of UK government debt was owned by insurance companies

There’s an assumption out there – one reflected in the briefing document inadvertently flashed to photographers [http://news.sky.com/story/1220388/ukraine-document-reveals-uk-stance-on-crisis] by an official outside Downing Street – that economic sanctions on Russia would not be worthwhile. The rationale has two strands: first, that any bar on trade and

It’s almost certainly too early to get worried about a housing bust in the UK. It may well happen, the way things are going with the property market at the moment – but not for some years. All the same, here’s an interesting statistic released by the Bank of

It’s easy to forget just how important a contribution oil and gas makes to the UK economy. Britain, after all, is a large and highly-diverse economy. But while it’s not a pure petro-economy, by the same token there is simply no way the economy would have been as

There is an awful lot of confusion today about whether today’s jobs figures show that unemployment has risen or fallen. So here’s the simple answer. Unemployment today is higher than the last time the Office for National Statistics reported it in January. That goes for both the unemployment