Five years, six property markets, mixed fortunes

A quick post looking at how property prices have changed in six cities since 2005.

Taxpayers in Baltics, UK and Ireland facing the toughest questions

Two weeks ago, I examined the IMF’s estimates for growth prospects in 2009 and came to the conclusion that in a year where countries such as Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Laos are among the world’s fastest growing economies, more open economies are being hit by a collapse in the globalized consumer’s demand. The temptation may be [...]

Are more open countries being hit harder in the recession?

A review of the IMF’s April 2009 World Economic Outlook, and an analysis of the fastest growing – and contracting – economies of 2009. The 2009 economic growth in Africa and Asia is welcome, and growth (albeit weaker) in China and India indicates the beginnings of self-sustaining domestic demand in those economies.

Protectionist backlash or falling consumer demand: Is the world in danger of deglobalization?

What if unemployment in Ireland reaches 25% next year? What if GDP falls a quarter between 2007 and 2012? The spectre of the Great Depression looms over us large at the moment and there has been much commentary of late – see for example Robert Samuelson’s recent blog post – on whether and how our [...]

A brand new scare graph – Japan’s collapsing exports

I have just discovered a set of global trade statistics updated monthly by the Dutch Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB). (Incidentally, this is not the first time I’ve come across excellent work by the CPB – their work on administrative burdens imposed by regulation is essentially the international pioneer on the topic and has [...]

The Pelosi scare-graph revisited: Private sector job losses and camel recessions

As some of you may know, Nancy Pelosi has been scaring people with graphs, recently. By her metric, namely the absolute numbers of jobs lost, the current recession is more severe – and faster – than the last couple of regressions. Naturally, something that high profile gained a lot of attention and ultimately modification. The [...]

The Humpty Dumpty threat: Will the euro fall apart?

Ricky Gervais has a very funny sketch about how ludicrous the children’s rhyme, Humpty Dumpty, is. In particular, employing horses, who don’t even have thumbs let alone opposable ones, to put him back together again. Actually, it’s so good, I’m going to embed it here: Anyway, spurious introduction aside, apparently according to the Financial Times [...]

Brother, Can You Bail-out my Bank? (1931 revisited!)

Every crisis creates its own artistic genius – take for example Picasso, or the Credit Crunch Blues. Mere mortals mightn’t move in quite the same league, but we can try. So, with sincere apologies for the butchering of Jay Gorney’s lovely music and the usurpation of Yip Harburg’s original lyrics, Weird Al, this one’s for [...]

Growth, inflation and investment: hot topics in emerging markets

Having recently discovered the fantastic word-cloud abilities of wordle.net, I decided to play around with it. I took the top 500 stories on Google News, for the term ‘Emerging Markets’, from June 2008. I had to make quite a few adjustments to take out names of newspapers etc., and the cleaning still isn’t complete, but [...]