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Ed Conway

Hi I'm Ed Conway and this is my website!

Mark Carney's dangerous new forward guidance

Mark Carney has a name for the new framework for monetary policy he unveiled yesterday: “forward guidance phase two”. My first thought yesterday when I listened to him at the Bank’s press conference was that it would be better entitled “fuzzy guidance [https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/433556298303799296]”. It

What today's Inflation Report means for you and your mortgage

The main message of today’s Inflation Report is that the Bank of England won’t be lifting interest rates anytime soon. It more or less endorsed market expectations for future changes in borrowing costs which means, all else being equal, interest rates should be going up some point early

The five things you need to know about the IFS Green Budget

When it comes to independent assessments of the UK economy, few come with as much authority, or indeed independence, as those from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The cover of the Green Budget, its annual audit of the UK’s economic and fiscal situation, comes with endorsements from both Ed

The 1970s all over again

Ed Balls’s speech promising a return to the 50p tax rate seems to have provoked all sorts of scare stories about a risk that Britain returns to the dark old days of the 1970s. Which is odd because when you take time to examine the data, in tax terms,

Big taxes, small print. Do Labour's 50p tax claims add up?

The problem with tax policy is that there’s always rather a lot of small print. Hidden beneath that big figure about the benefits of your proposed tax change are a whole load of assumptions (often untested) and provisos (usually unvoiced). The upshot is that every time anyone announces a

RIP Forward Guidance?

Forward guidance, as I’ve said briefly before [https://www.edmundconway.com/2013/11/growth-the-bank-of-england-and-the-honey-bee/] , is a little like a male honeybee. It lives only for the briefest period of time and dies when it has achieved its life’s purpose: in the case of the honeybee, fertilising the Queen

IMF predicts more growth, but is it the right kind of growth?

The chances are that by now you’re already well aware of the gist of the International Monetary Fund’s latest update to their economic forecasts [http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2014/update/01/index.htm]. As we revealed on Sky News yesterday, the Fund is raising