Home Blog

Blog

Search

Inflation is still a major problem
Pete Comley
15 July 2013
1 comment

If you look at UK inflation over the last few centuries, you are immediately struck by the change that occurred after 1945. Until then, inflation took place mainly during major wars and then periods...
Plan to ring-fence banks misguided
Richard Wellings
6 February 2013
3 comments

The British government is right to be examining ways of shielding taxpayers from the costs of bank failure. However, proposals to ring-fence the retail operations of banks, and indeed to give the...
Has the Bank of England abandoned inflation targeting?
Philip Booth
23 January 2013
comments

  An interesting comment was made recently by Andrew Lilico at a meeting of the IEA’s Shadow Monetary Policy Committee. He suggested that the Bank of England has given up inflation...
The gold standard and the Titanic
Jose-Maria Garcia-Casado
12 July 2012
comments

Occasionally we hear the voices of a minority with a penchant for the Austrian School of thought, questioning the current monetary system and calling for a return to the gold standard or a similar...
Was 1976 really the best year? A review of Seasons in the Sun by Dominic Sandbrook
Chris Snowdon
28 June 2012
2 comments

If he maintains this Stakhanovite work-rate, Dominic Sandbrook will have written the definitive, 8,000-page history of Britain’s post-Churchillian twentieth century by the time he is 44 years...
The answer is 'inflation'. What was the question?
G. R. Steele
1 June 2012
comments

Martin Wolf recently committed the Financial Times to a $71.88 lunch-time interview with Paul Krugman. Whatever the quality of the meal, the interview was poor value. Three questions were covered:...
Oil prices and inflation
G. R. Steele
14 March 2011
2 comments

Inflation is the process whereby ‘things’ – balloons, tyres, opinions, etc. – wbecome enlarged. Deflation is the reverse process. In economics, inflation generally refers to...
How can so many economists be wrong-headed on inflation?
G. R. Steele
21 January 2011
16 comments

A member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee believes that inflation has been driven ‘by higher food and energy costs’; and the head of the European Central Bank...
Blanchflower has an inflated view of the powers of central banks
Philip Booth
18 November 2010
3 comments

David Blanchflower has once again suggested that we would not need to worry about austerity if only we allowed price inflation of 5% for a few years. Let us ignore the moral issues of whether...
Mervyn King: wisdom and integrity at the Bank of England
Charles K. Rowley
3 August 2010
3 comments

Mervyn King was appointed Deputy Governor of the Bank of England in 1997 and became an ex-officio member of the Bank’s interest-rate setting Monetary Policy Committee when the...
British government DEFAULT
D. R. Myddelton
9 July 2010
4 comments

It is distressing to witness yet another piece of financial chicanery by the British government, which now proposes to substitute the Consumer Prices Index for the Retail Prices Index as the “...
The Bancor – doomed to failure?
Andre Johnston Phijuntjitr
17 June 2010
3 comments

Over the past year there have been murmurings of expansive new proposals for a global reserve currency to replace the long suffering, yet still hegemonic, dollar. One such proposal has been the...
Do we need a central bank?
Andre Johnston Phijuntjitr
9 June 2010
21 comments

A trillion here, 500 billion there - it seems no amount is too much when the authorities want to fix a perforated economy. Keeping an economy on life support through extensive...
The elephant in the room: debasement of our purchasing power
Toby Baxendale
29 April 2010
23 comments

Language was created spontaneously and needed no act of creation or sanction by the state – it is owned by each and every one of us. Money was also created this way, but today we have...
Inflation must follow
Steven Kates
23 February 2010
1 comment

The world is filled with irony and idiocies aplenty. For how many years was inflation targeting the very essence of economic policy when the threat of inflation was hardly anywhere to be seen. How...
Price-level targeting – the next big idea?
Philip Booth
25 September 2009
10 comments

If the next government, of whatever colour, insists on not taking the bold step of getting the government out of the production and management of the money supply – and political realism...
What’s wrong with falling house prices?
Peter King
6 August 2009
2 comments

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) announced today that they had changed their forecast on house prices for 2009, and that instead of a fall they now foresee a...
Mixed signals from inflation data
Philip Booth
21 May 2009
2 comments

A couple of days ago the bogus Consumer Price Index registered a dip to an annual rise of 2.3%. The RPI fell further into negative territory. Perhaps the best measure of inflation, RPIX (the...
Inflation: can we trust the politicians?
D. R. Myddelton
20 April 2009
2 comments

The British government, in common with many other governments, has embarked on a policy of “quantitative easing” [QE], also known as “printing money”. Can we trust them to...
Quantitative easing: we need another Lawson
Philip Booth
10 March 2009
4 comments

Quantitative easing has become such a buzzword that it has now become known by its initials – QE. On a number of occasions, I have discussed its merits in the current circumstances and then...

IEA Brexit prize

Support us

Invest in the IEA. We are the catalyst for changing consensus and influencing public debate.

Donate now

Thank you for
your support

Subscribe to
publications

Subscribe

eNEWSLETTER