It’s one of our few remaining areas of comparative advantage

And convert ‘oo’ into ‘u’

“An improvement in productivity has caused the slowdown in productivity“

In which case, maybe we have found a solution to France's fiscal problems!

A key problem is time consistency. Why would any country believe that a US security guarantee (that they've effectively handed over $$$$ for) made by this administration will be worth anything in 1, 5, or 10 years' time?

(costs don't always disappear just because you move them off the budget; as I regularly say, failing to repair a bridge is a bigger unfunded commitment and burden on future generations than borrowing money to repair it)

Yes, that was the bit that they didn't plan to publish in the Telegraph.

It’s an appalling, embarrassing, piece of analysis.

“Should we do some causal inference?”

“Nah, fuck it, draw a big red circle and it’ll go viral on LinkedIn”

That river is definitely alive!

Thoroughly enjoying this.

Amazing. Thank you for popping this into my feed. I’d never have heard it otherwise.

Quite. They don’t account for that in those charts of strong US vs shitty European GDP that are doing the rounds on LinkedIn at the moment.

Brilliant

Agree: I think he was called either Emmanuel Macron or Mario Draghi!!! The problem, as the problem has been since 2009, is that the Germans said and say "nein" to such ideas.

To butcher a quote from Dixon's 'On the psychology of military incompetence': "Spreads will look a darn sight worse with a load of bloody Russians running around"

You could argue that the fact that the economy doesn't do anything interesting but just steadily declines, accompanied by an equally deteriorating security situation to the east, are in fact the real crises and are far more serious and existential than a few basis points on French spreads.

Agree. We just need to be unsparing and ruthless about what’s in our interest. Which means being dewy-eyed about neither the EU nor the ‘special relationship’.

The Huw Locke exhibition that’s on at the British Museum now does just that in a really effective, interesting, thoughtful way.