The Automatic Earth

Last week, Britain's Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards issued a report that lists a number of recommendations for an overhaul of the country's banking sector. The idea is that Chancellor George Osborne includes them in his Banking Reform Bill, a preliminary draft of which was publicly criticized by the Commission in March. Whether the government will actually follow the recommendations, however, remains to be seen; PM David Cameron and his cabinet have sung their praises of the City and its

Last week I read a few lines in a Dutch newspaper article about pensions that immediately took me back to something I wrote in early May about youth unemployment – especially in southern Europe, where it's often 50% or more -. There is a common thread that links pensions to employment to stimulus measures: the younger generations invariably get the short end of the stick. Until they don't, of course, for they have one thing going for them. Age. Before

From yet another "gruelling" tour comes this once again highly recommended 1 hour podcast from New Zealand's GreenplanetFM radio, in which Nicole, as usual, covers a wide range of topics, with indepth analysis of issues specific to an economy like New Zealand's, a nation so dependent on trade it's dangerous, but also blessed with a ratio of resource base to population that offers possibilities many other countries do not have. For instance, New Zealand suffers from massive soil depletion because

It's sort of funny to see a wider – though still faint – recognition developing in the financial world that perhaps it's true that the more stimulus is applied in today's global economies, the faster it will hit a wall. Some may finally even begin to see one or more inbuilt mechanisms at work. I personally think it all harks back to what I've long said, that stimulus by governments and central banks may have a function in certain economic