Economics
Did rising prosperity end for most people in 2003?
Did median real wages stop rising in 2003? I have been puzzled by this claim since the Resolution Foundation made it last October, and I am puzzled by it now that Duncan Weldon, an economist at the TUC, takes issue with me for suggesting that people generally continued to be better off until the bank crisis of 2008.
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 12 June 2013 at 9:48 am
Lack of clarity about Labour’s spending plans
This, via Full Fact, is the only graph you need to continue the debate about housing policy. If the conventional wisdom is that the Attlee and Macmillan governments built a lot of houses, it contradicts it. Not many were built under Attlee, and the peak was under Wilson in 1968. Which is what gave us [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 9 June 2013 at 9:24 pm
“We will spend the money which we inherit, no more”
Ed Balls, one of the 10 most interesting politicians in Britain, was interviewed by Andrew Neil on the BBC’s Sunday Politics. Here is the transcript.
AN: Ed Balls joins me now for the Sunday interview. Ed Balls, welcome back. Both you and Mr Miliband, you made major speeches last week. What of importance do we now [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 9 June 2013 at 3:58 pm
In Praise of Iain Dale
Some of them don’t like it when they have their previous views pointed out, do they?
I said yesterday that the Conservative Party, Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes had failed to criticise Gordon Brown’s borrowing at the time. I thought, therefore, that they were poorly placed to criticise Ed Balls now for saying he didn’t think [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Wednesday, 5 June 2013 at 10:40 am
In Defence of Ed Balls
The one thing more annoying than Ed Balls refusing to accept that the Labour government was irresponsible to borrow at the peak of the boom is the utter delight and feigned incomprehension of right-wingers at the Shadow Chancellor’s statement yesterday:
Do I think the last Labour government was profligate, spent too much, had too much national [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Tuesday, 4 June 2013 at 3:07 pm
Myth: petrol prices go up but never down
An enjoyable event at the Institute for Economic Affairs: a joint one with Prospect magazine about “Labour and the Cost of Living”.
I posted my thoughts on the subject, if it can be called that, here earlier.
One sub-subject did come up for which I was prepared, but it requires a graph to show the evidence. Gisela [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 3 June 2013 at 10:20 pm
Labour and the cost of living: Moonshine politics
This is a cross post from Prospect blogs (with added graph).
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 3 June 2013 at 2:28 pm
Economic History Lesson
Nigel Lawson, Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1979-81 (second from left in picture), told Treasury civil servants at a seminar organised by the Mile End Group two weeks ago (but online only today):
There’s a reason why you today can feel confident … Based on the example of what we did in the 1980s, squeezing public [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 17 May 2013 at 2:14 pm
Live Well for Less*
We are used to Ed Miliband’s post-neo-liberal mumbo-jumbo on the economy. We heard more of it in his speech to Progress on Saturday (see below). What was surprising, reading David Sainsbury’s book, Progressive Capitalism, is that he too criticises the New Labour government, in which he too was a minister, because it failed to “question fundamentally [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 13 May 2013 at 6:19 pm
“Machines for rushing to judgement”
Ben Broadbent, member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England and former Goldman Sachs economist, gave a fine talk on “forecast errors” at the Mile End Group at Queen Mary, University of London, last night. The text has lots of great graphs in it, including this one of difference between the MPC’s [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 2 May 2013 at 2:28 pm
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