https://felixmartin.org Felix Martin Mon, 05 Sep 2022 12:59:33 +0000 https://felixmartin.org en http://felixmartin.org/Investing Mon, 05 Sep 2022 12:59:33 +0000 Felix Martin 429974 Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books &nbsp; Media&nbsp; &nbsp;Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact Investing I have written articles, op-eds, and book reviews for many publications, including the New York Review of Books, Wired, the Financial Times, The Observer, and for several years I wrote an economics column for the New Statesman. Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books &nbsp; Media&nbsp; &nbsp;Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact Investing I have written articles, op-eds, and book reviews for... http://felixmartin.org/Archive-Media Sat, 21 Aug 2021 14:20:34 +0000 Felix Martin 410514 Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books&nbsp; &nbsp;Articles&nbsp; &nbsp;Media&nbsp; &nbsp; Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact Archive&nbsp; |&nbsp; Media and Podcasts Podcast&nbsp; &nbsp;| &nbsp; Money - The Unauthorised Biogrpahy&nbsp;with Russell NapierLibrary of Mistakes podcast&nbsp;|&nbsp; 13 February 2025 Russell Napier quizzes Felix Martin about his book, Money – The Unauthorised Biography. A fascinating listen for anyone interested in the true nature of money, illuminated through entertaining examples such as the Irish Bank Strike of 1970, the Argentinian Crédito and the Bristol Pound. Radio&nbsp; &nbsp;| &nbsp; The Long History of Ignorance presented by Rory Stewart BBC Sounds&nbsp; |&nbsp; 8 July 2024 In this six-part series, Rory Stewart explores the idea that understanding ignorance is as important as acquiring knowledge. He interviews me in Episode 4: Ignorance in Politics. Podcast&nbsp; &nbsp;| &nbsp;&nbsp;An Intellectual History of Money with Greg LaBlanc UnSILOed&nbsp; |&nbsp; 26 September 2023 UnSILOed is a fantastic podcast hosted by polymathic UC Berkeley, Stanford, and HEC Paris educator Greg LaBlanc.Greg and I discussed the history of money, why Bagehot’s Lombard Street does not feature on economic reading lists, and what financial systems built on CBDCs would look like (from 49:00 mins - my favourite part!). Radio&nbsp; &nbsp;| &nbsp; The Listening Service presented by Tom Service BBC Radio 3&nbsp; |&nbsp; 16 June 2023 The Listening Service is an extraordinarily imaginative programme, in which Tom Service explores how music works. As a music-lover and (very) amateur cellist, I hugely enjoyed joining Tom for this episode, Money Makes the Music Go Round, which investigates the intimate links between music and money, from Prokofiev to the Pet Shop Boys. Television&nbsp; | &nbsp; Capitalism of Desire 2022 Summer Special : The Metaverse NHK Japan&nbsp; |&nbsp; Summer 2022 Capitalism of Desire is a flagship documentary series on the modern economy from Japan’s national public service broadcaster NHK. Its 2022 Summer Special focused on the concept of the metaverse and its economic potential, and I was one of the contributors interviewed, alongside Cambridge University’s Diane Coyle, Stanford’s Niall Ferguson, and many eminent Japanese experts. You can watch the Special here (my own contribution starts at 44:00). Podcast&nbsp; | &nbsp; Can DeFi Be The Better Financial System? presented by Samantha Yap YAP Cast &nbsp;|&nbsp; 19 October 2021 Samantha Yap is the founder and CEO of Yap Global, and one of the leading communications and media specialists in the fintech, blockchain, and crypto industries.&nbsp; Her YAP Cast podcast series The Story of Money aims to bridge the communication gap between emerging technology and the mainstream world.In the second part of this two-episode series, Samantha interviewed me about how the history of money can help us understand the opportunities and risks posed by the digital revolution sweeping through finance - and especially Decentralised Finance (DeFi).You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple. Podcast&nbsp; | &nbsp; Why do financial crises happen? presented by Samantha Yap YAP Cast &nbsp;|&nbsp; 12 October 2021 Samantha Yap is the founder and CEO of Yap Global, and one of the leading communications and media specialists in the fintech, blockchain, and crypto industries.&nbsp; Her YAP Cast podcast series The Story of Money aims to bridge the communication gap between emerging technology and the mainstream world. In the first part of this two-episode series, Samantha interviewed me about financial crises: what they are, why they happen, and how the ongoing digital revolution in finance may be changing things. You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple. Television&nbsp; | &nbsp; Capitalism of Desire : The Monetary Theory of Desire NHK Japan |&nbsp; 2019 Capitalism of Desire is a flagship documentary series on the modern economy from Japan’s national public service broadcaster NHK.Its 2019 programme, The Monetary Theory of Desire focused on the role of money and finance in the capitalist system, and the new phenomenon of cryptocurrency.&nbsp; You can watch the documentary&nbsp;here (password: yoku).&nbsp; I discuss bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and their relation to the history of money and monetary policy for about ten minutes starting at 25:30. Radio&nbsp; &nbsp;| &nbsp; 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy presented by Tim Harford BBC World Service Radio |&nbsp; 27 May 2017 Forget (if you can) 50 Shades of Grey: Tim Harford has a new book and BBC World Service radio series out exploring 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy. One of these 50 things is the humble tally stick – a little-known curiosity of medieval monetary history which turns out to have much to teach us about both the nature of modern finance and how we think of it. The episode – which like all of Tim Harford’s writings and broadcasts is concise, witty, and comes strongly recommended by me – is available online here. My own book Money: The Unauthorised Biography is kindly mentioned as a source – and you can watch me giving a talk about the topic here if you are interested in following the story a little further. Lecture&nbsp; | &nbsp; What is Sovereign Wealth? University of Oxford&nbsp; |&nbsp; 29 January 2016 In early 2016, Oxford University’s Department of Politics and International Relations, in co-operation with the New Economics Foundation and Positive Money, organised a series of seminars to discuss the need for innovation in the management of sovereign wealth, entitled Rethinking Public Assets. I was a participant in the first of these seminars, which also featured presentations from Stefan Fölster, Director of the Stockholm Reform Institute and author of The Public Wealth of Nations, and Angela Cummine of New College, Oxford, whose marvellous book Citizens’ Wealth: &nbsp;Why (and How) Sovereign Funds Should be Managed by the People, for the People was published in August, 2016. I discussed what really constitutes sovereign wealth in the modern age, and whether the UK government should revisit the idea of a National Investment Bank as a means of capitalising on its assets, drawing heavily on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes on both counts. You can listen to a podcast of the seminar here (my own contribution starts at 47:00). Radio&nbsp; &nbsp;| &nbsp; The Lowdown on Money presented by Richard Aedy ABC Radio National &nbsp;|&nbsp; 10 March 2016 When Richard Aedy, the presenter of ABC Radio National’s flagship business and economics programme The Money, asked their listeners what question they would most like to hear answered, he got a simple response: What is money? I was one of the people Richard interviewed in The lowdown on money in search of the answer – alongside the estimable Steve Keen of Kingston University and Mardi Dungey of the University of Tasmania. It’s an excellently made programme, providing a very clear introduction to how the modern money and banking system works in under half an hour. P.S. In the programme, I explain that money is best thought of as a ‘social technology’. &nbsp;This very useful term – which the presenters pick up on quite a bit – is not mine: it was coined by the Cambridge sociologist Geoffrey Ingham in his masterful book The Nature of Money – required reading for anyone interested in money, its history, and how it works. Radio&nbsp; &nbsp;| &nbsp; The Illusion of Money presented by Anik See CBC Radio&nbsp; | 24 February 2016 We think we know what money is. We use it every day and our lives are unimaginable without it. &nbsp;But look more closely and you find that coins and dollar bills aren’t “real”. They’re promises, symbols, ideas. &nbsp;And exactly what money is has evolved enormously over the ages. On Wednesday, February 24, 2016, CBC Radio broadcast the first part of The Illusion of Money, a new radio documentary exploring how we’re rethinking one of the most basic features of human society from the Canadian writer and documentary-maker Anik See. I am one of the people Anik interviews for the programme. &nbsp;The others include artist Serge Onnen, anthropologist Joris Luyendijk, and the amazing Isabel Rupschus, experimenter in the art of with living without money. Radio&nbsp; &nbsp;| &nbsp; The Why Factor presented by Mike Williams BBC World Service Radio&nbsp; | 5 July 2015 In his BBC World Service programme The Why Factor, Mike Williams searches for the extraordinary and hidden histories behind everyday objects and actions in always fascinating, twenty minute episodes. In the July 5, 2015 episode, I am one of those with whom Mike&nbsp;explores&nbsp;the past, present, and future of one of the&nbsp;most basic, but underrated, cogs of our modern&nbsp;economic systems,&nbsp;as he asks Why Do We Need Cash? Lecture&nbsp; |&nbsp; Are Markets Moral? London School of Economics |&nbsp; 14 January 2015 On January 14, 2015, Robert Skidelsky and I appeared at the London School of Economics in conversation on the topics covered by Are Markets Moral?, a new book edited by Robert and his son Edward Skidelsky. &nbsp;A podcast of the event is available here. My contribution to Are Markets Moral? is an essay called “The Meaning of Money”. Radio&nbsp; &nbsp;| &nbsp; Theme and Variations: What We Value BBC Radio 3 &nbsp;| 5 October 2013 To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Between the Ears, the award-winning Radio 3 showcase for adventurous feature-making, has commissioned Shadowplay – a ‘symphony of voices’ in four movements, each by a different group of feature-makers. The first movement – Theme and Variations: What We Value by Alan Hall and Hana Walker-Brown – was broadcast on Saturday, October 5, 2013. I was one of several people interviewed for the programme; others included the economist and author Ha-Joon Chang, the life-model Sue Tilly, and the poet Jazzman John Clarke. &nbsp;Out of these interviews, Alan and Hana have spun a marvellously evocative meditation on the nature of value. I will be listening out for other features from their production company, Falling Tree. Radio&nbsp; &nbsp;| &nbsp; The Forum: Does Finance Have to be Invisible? BBC World Service Radio &nbsp;| 19 May 2013 On May 19, 2013, I was a guest on the BBC World Service programme The Forum, for an edition entitled Does Finance Have to Be Invisible? It is an ancient question – one that has troubled people ever since money was invented. &nbsp;How is it that finance, which has no physical existence itself, exerts such power over the production and exchange of real things? &nbsp;How can it be that dealing in pieces of paper enriches people more than doing real work? &nbsp;Is the invisibility of finance really just a means of concealing systematic deception? Bridget Kendall leads a discussion of these and other questions with Professor Anat Admati of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, the artist and film-maker Zachary Formwalt, and me. Anat Admati’s new book, co-authored with Martin Hellwig, The Emperor’s New Clothes, has just been published in the UK. &nbsp;It is a major book for anyone interested in the ongoing global debate over banking reform. Zachary Formwalt’s films In Place of Capital and The Royal Exchange (after Henry Talbot) are fascinating meditations on the nature and aesthetics of finance. &nbsp;If you are lucky enough to get a chance to see them, do so. Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books&nbsp; &nbsp;Articles&nbsp; &nbsp;Media&nbsp; &nbsp; Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact Archive&nbsp; |&nbsp; Media and... http://felixmartin.org/Archive-Articles Sat, 21 Aug 2021 14:19:24 +0000 Felix Martin 410513 Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books&nbsp; &nbsp;Articles&nbsp; &nbsp; Media&nbsp; &nbsp;Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact Archive&nbsp; |&nbsp; Articles, Columns, and Op-Eds Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; New US Asia pivot is better timed than the last Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 21 February 2025 In 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama announced America’s “pivot to Asia”– only for conflicts from Afghanistan to Ukraine to bog him down. In Brussels last week, however, newly installed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth renewed the United States’s pledge to refocus on China. It might seem that Uncle Sam has left it a bit late, given the Middle Kingdom’s rise in the intervening years. Yet emerging fault lines in China’s economic strategy suggest that now might be an opportune moment for the pivot after allYou can read why &nbsp;here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; AI’s civil war will force investors to take sides Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 7 February 2025 In their satirical history of the United Kingdom, “1066 And All That”, the authors W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman cast the English civil war of the 17th century as a conflict between the “Wrong but Romantic” Cavaliers and the “Right but Revolting” Roundheads. The aftermath of the release last month of Chinese startup DeepSeek’s R1 artificial intelligence model, which matches or outperforms existing offerings from U.S. technology titans at a fraction of the cost, has exposed a similar divide among the world’s leading innovators in the field of machine learning. You can read all about it &nbsp;here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; There are few good ways out of China’s stock slump Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 22 November 2024 In the 1979 disaster movie “The China Syndrome”, a design flaw at a nuclear power plant threatens a catastrophic meltdown in which the reactor core will burn all the way through to the other side of the earth. Investors in Chinese equities have lately been enduring a China Syndrome of their own. Over the last three-and-a-half years, the benchmark CSI 300 Index has lost nearly a third of its value, even as the S&amp;P 500 Index basket of leading U.S. stocks has soared to new all-time highs. With Donald Trump set to return to the White House backed by a Republican-controlled Congress, should investors brace for Chinese stocks to shrivel further – or is now the moment to take a contrarian view? You can read my answer here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; George Soros’ 1980s debt warning echoes today Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 8 November 2024 “The stock market boom has diverted our attention from the fundamental deterioration in the financial position of the United States.” So wrote hedge-fund titan George Soros in late 1986 in his investment classic “The Alchemy of Finance”. His ominous warning of the threat that unsustainable public finances can pose was realised spectacularly the following October, when the U.S. equity market registered its fastest crash in history.On the eve of Tuesday’s presidential election, the S&amp;P 500 Index traded at 25 times earnings – more than 50% above its long-term average – and the Congressional Budget Office was predicting that U.S. public debt would by 2027 blow through the record set immediately after World War II, relative to GDP. With a Republican clean sweep of Congress looking likely, even that looks under-egged. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reckons that by 2035 President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign plans will add up to a further US$ 15.6 trillion to the US public debt. U.S. Treasury yields have risen sharply. Soros’ four-decade old warning is all too relevant again.This time, the problem won’t be confined to Uncle Sam alone, however, since it is far from just the U.S. government’s financial position that is in dire straits. The International Monetary Fund calculates that global public debt this year will breach $100 trillion, or 93 per cent of world GDP, and predicts that it will hit 100 per cent by 2030. That’s the optimistic version. As the IMF itself drily observes: “past experience shows that projections tend to systematically underestimate debt levels”. You can read all about it in my column&nbsp; here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; Why stablecoins will entrench dollar’s supremacy Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 25 October 2024 Uncle Sam can rest easy for now. A Russian plan to break the grip of the U.S. dollar through a new international payments network met a cool reception at the BRICS summit in Kazan this week, with the emerging market club’s official declaration failing to mention the “BRICS Bridge” initiative by name. Rather than slipping, in fact, the greenback’s supremacy may be strengthening because of an entirely different monetary innovation: dollar-backed stablecoins.Russia’s BRICS Bridge would enable the settlement of trade and finance between Brazil, China, India and other members of the group, using their own central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). A mooted second stage would introduce a new international currency backed in part by gold. That could threaten not just the reach, but also the value, of the U.S. dollar. The yellow metal would rally, and the greenback wilt, if use of the new monetary unit were to take off. With the gold price touching an all-time-high of nearly $2,750 per ounce on the summit’s first day, there was speculation that traders were already front-running the rout. In the end, however, the meeting’s official statement gestured only vaguely towards the project that Moscow bills as a major reorientation of the international monetary system.Instead, the most important monetary announcement of the week took place in California. On Monday, San Francisco-based U.S. payments firm Stripe announced the acquisition of a little-known crypto startup for US$ 1.1 billion. Its target – called, coincidentally, Bridge – is a specialist in stablecoins: private, digital currencies pegged to a fiat currency such as the dollar. This Stripe-Bridge stablecoin tie-up is more likely to define the future world monetary order than the BRICS Bridge CBDC one. It is also likely to strengthen, not weaken, the role of the greenback – and perhaps its value too. You can read all about it in my column&nbsp; here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; What Masayoshi Son can teach us about investing Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 11 October 2024 When OpenAI raised $6.6 billion of fresh capital last week, the pioneering artificial intelligence startup’s implied $157 bn valuation was the headline-grabbing news. Yet squirreled away in its list of new shareholders was another surprising disclosure.Investing alongside tech venture capitalist Thrive Capital, financial bluebloods like Khosla Ventures and Fidelity Management &amp; Research, and heavyweight corporate partners such as Microsoft and Nvidia, was a $500 million contribution from SoftBank – the Japanese group synonymous with its eccentric founder Masayoshi Son.To say that opinions are divided on the value of a financial endorsement from SoftBank would be putting it mildly. Son is probably the most controversial venture capitalist the world has ever seen. His rollercoaster career represents a case study for the original conundrum of active investing: is there really such a thing as skill, or is it all just a matter of luck? You can read all about it in my column&nbsp; here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; Donald Trump may dent but not dethrone King Dollar Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 26 July2024 Donald Trump&nbsp;says he&nbsp;wants to reverse the strong dollar policy which has underpinned the&nbsp;U.S.&nbsp;economic framework since the early 1990s. “We have a big currency problem”&nbsp;the former president said in an interview with Bloomberg&nbsp;published last week. His choice for&nbsp;vice president,&nbsp;J.D.&nbsp;Vance, goes&nbsp;even&nbsp;further.&nbsp;The senator from Ohio&nbsp;wants rid of the dollar’s role as&nbsp;de facto global currency as well. “The strong dollar is sort of the sacred cow of the Washington consensus,” he explained in 2023, “but when I survey the American economy, and I see our mass consumption of mostly useless imports on the one hand and our hollowed-out industrial base on the other hand, I wonder if the reserve currency status also has some downsides.” Conventional wisdom holds that a second&nbsp;Trump&nbsp;administration would struggle to make good on either mission.&nbsp;That view is correct when it comes to the greenback’s global reserve&nbsp;status, but&nbsp;more questionable when it comes to a weaker&nbsp;exchange rate. You can read all about it in my column&nbsp; here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; Why AI may fail to unlock the productivity puzzle Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 5 July2024 The world’s advanced economies are in the grip of a prolonged productivity crisis. In the decade following the financial crisis of&nbsp;2008, the growth of output per hour worked in the&nbsp;Group of Seven&nbsp;rich countries slumped to less than&nbsp;1%&nbsp;a year –&nbsp;less than&nbsp;half the rate of the decade before.&nbsp;This dismal performance&nbsp;is the&nbsp;single biggest economic problem facing the developed world – as well as the root of much of political and geostrategic angst. Artificial intelligence is hailed as a potential game-changer.&nbsp;BlackRock&nbsp;CEO Larry Fink claims it will “transform margins across sectors”.&nbsp; Goldman Sachs predicts it will boost productivity growth by up to 3 percentage&nbsp;points per year in the United States over the next decade.&nbsp; The McKinsey Global Institute says it could add up to $26 trillion to global GDP. Investors should beware of the hype. Four features of AI suggest that&nbsp;while&nbsp;its impact on the bottom line of&nbsp;some&nbsp;companies may be positive, its economy-wide consequences will be less impressive. Indeed,&nbsp;self-teaching computers&nbsp;may make the productivity crisis worse. &nbsp; You can read all about it in my column&nbsp; here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; The economics of AI point to the value of good data Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 28 June 2024 Nvidia briefly became the most valuable company in the world last week after shares in&nbsp;the leading supplier of chips and networking infrastructure used to train&nbsp;artificial&nbsp;intelligence (AI) models nearly tripled&nbsp;since January.&nbsp;Yet the AI revolution has so far proved far from a one-way bet:&nbsp;most of the&nbsp;stocks in&nbsp;a host of AI-focused indices and funds are down this year. Even the $3.1 trillion&nbsp;Nvidia has been a wild ride.&nbsp;In the three trading sessions following its historic peak, it lost more than $400 billion in market value.&nbsp;The&nbsp;week before it had added $360 billion. Over the past three years, its share price volatility has been five times higher than that of the S&amp;P 500&nbsp;Index. These epic gyrations reflect investor uncertainty over the economics of AI. The&nbsp;achievements and promise&nbsp;of self-teaching computers are&nbsp;obvious.&nbsp;How much&nbsp;the technology&nbsp;costs and who will pay&nbsp;for it&nbsp;is less clear.&nbsp;For investors seeking to&nbsp;navigate this treacherous landscape, it is important to start with&nbsp;the technological advance on which the current AI revolution depends. &nbsp; &nbsp; You can read all about it in my column&nbsp; here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; Net zero arbitrage is big, but no one-way bet Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 14 June 2024 If macro investing has one signature strategy, it is exploiting the arbitrage between unsustainable policy and irresistible reality.&nbsp;The biggest disconnect today is the gap between the ambition of governments in the rich world to&nbsp;eliminate net&nbsp;carbon emissions&nbsp;by 2050&nbsp;and their ability to deliver&nbsp;on&nbsp;that goal. However, it is not a one-way bet. The classic example of a macro arbitrage is&nbsp;betting against a fixed exchange rate, where a&nbsp;government&nbsp;has&nbsp;committed&nbsp;to keep its currency pegged&nbsp;to another.&nbsp;Investors who reckon the cost of&nbsp;defending the peg&nbsp;will be politically or economically intolerable sell&nbsp;the currency&nbsp;short. The&nbsp;country’s&nbsp;central bank is forced either to drain its reserves of foreign exchange or hike interest rates.&nbsp;Eventually, the peg snaps.&nbsp; Investors who get&nbsp;it right – as George Soros did in 1992 when he bet that&nbsp;the pound&nbsp;would crash out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism – can make a&nbsp;killing in an afternoon.&nbsp;Those who get it wrong&nbsp;can lose their shirts, as Marko Dimitrijevic of Everest Capital learned when the Swiss central bank unexpectedly lifted the cap on the country’s currency against the euro in January 2015. Unfortunately for&nbsp;today’s&nbsp;would-be Masters of the Universe, currency pegs have gone out of fashion.&nbsp;However, the&nbsp;challenge of climate change is delivering a new&nbsp;arbitrage&nbsp;opportunity far bigger than anything they have ever seen before. The set-up is the gap between&nbsp;governments’ policies of eliminating emissions of greenhouse gases&nbsp;and&nbsp;the&nbsp;economic, physical, and geopolitical&nbsp;constraints on&nbsp;reaching that goal. You can read all about it in my column&nbsp; here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; Trasformismo all’inglese Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 31 May 2024 “Change”. The single-word slogan under which Britain’s opposition Labour Party has chosen to fight the upcoming general election is certainly succinct. Judging by the opinion polls, nothing more is needed. Labour leads the governing Conservative Party by more than 20 percentage points. Yet when it comes to macroeconomic policy, change is hard to find. The party’s economic manifesto is instead characterised by conspicuous continuity. This position will be hard to sustain. Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has pledged not to tinker with the independence of the Bank of England and promised that the central bank’s 2% inflation target is sacrosanct. Her sole flirtation with novelty is a pledge to add fighting climate change as a supplementary objective. Even that is a revival of a tweak first made by then-chancellor Rishi Sunak in 2021. You can read all about it in my column&nbsp; here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; Private credit wonder drug works in limited dose Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 17 May 2024 Private credit is big and getting bigger. The practice whereby companies borrow directly from specialised funds, bypassing banks and the bond market, has exploded in recent years. That breakneck growth is making global watchdogs fret over risks to financial stability. A more fundamental question, however, is whether it promotes or impedes the ultimate purpose of the financial system: to support real economic growth. Once upon a time companies that wanted to borrow money went to a bank. By the early twentieth century, the largest and most creditworthy corporations began to mimic governments by selling bonds to investors. In the early 1990s, entrepreneurial financiers took advantage of the crisis in the U.S. savings and loan industry to open the public debt markets to smaller and riskier companies. Today, high-yield corporate bonds are a $3 trillion global asset class. Private credit is a more recent innovation. The practice emerged around the turn of the millennium as a source of finance for companies seeking more than a commercial bank loan, but too little to justify tapping the bond market. The global banking meltdown of 2007-2008 gave this source of financing a big boost. The IMF estimates it has ballooned from less than $0.5 trillion a decade ago to $2.1 trillion last year. JPMorgan analysts put the total even higher, at more than $3.1 trillion. More than 85% of private credit transactions, meanwhile, are now bigger than $1 billion. You can read all about it in my column&nbsp; here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; China’s financial clout will be hard to reverse Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 4 March 2024 The ongoing debt crisis in developing countries has exposed an important but underappreciated fact about the global economy: China’s multi-decade emergence as the world’s premier exporter has made it into a superpower of international finance as well. The crisis has also revealed how unprepared the People’s Republic is for that role. Yet the unavoidable logic of international economics means that it will not be vacating it any time soon. The “China shock” which followed the accession by the People’s Republic to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 is so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page, opens new tab. It is well deserved. China’s emergence as the workshop of the world comprehensively reshaped the global economy, raised the living standards of its 1.2 billion citizens faster than any other country in history, and provided manufactured goods to the rest of the world at unbeatable prices. It also had some epoch-making negative effects, however. It played a leading role, opens new tab in accelerating the deindustrialisation of large parts of the United States, spurring a lurch into protectionism, and may have hastened the general political meltdown in several Western democracies. Now a second China shock is quietly detonating in international finance. You can read all about it and how the West can hope to handle it in my column&nbsp; here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; Multipolar world opens up surprising safe havens Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 17 November 2023 A quarter of a century ago, then-French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine coined a new term to describe the United States: “l’hyperpuissance” – the world’s sole “hyperpower”. It was the guarantor of global security, the rule-maker for global trade, and the undisputed international hegemon. Today, the “Pax Americana” lies in tatters; free trade is a fading dream; and summits such as this week’s meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden set the world agenda. The days of America’s undisputed global dominance are over. Geopolitically, we live once more in a multipolar world. Yet in international finance, the unipolar moment is more extreme than ever. The U.S. dollar remains the de facto global currency, while the United States is in a league of its own as the world’s biggest net debtor. Take the country’s net international investment position (NIIP) - the benchmark metric of a nation’s overall balance sheet, which subtracts the sum of foreign investors’ financial claims on it from its own investors’ claims abroad. In June 2023 this stood at -$18 trillion, or a deficit equivalent to 67% of U.S. economic output. That is more than double the deficit of 33% a decade earlier, and more than seven times larger than in 2007. No other economy comes close when it comes to soaking up the savings of the world. How did this astonishing disconnect between geopolitics and international financial flows develop – and how long can it last? The details of the U.S. NIIP tell an interesting and alarming tale. I tell it in my column&nbsp; here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; Rich countries are stumbling into a debt trap Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 3 November 2023 “A billion here, a billion there”, Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen reputedly said of the U.S. budget deficit in the mid-1960s, “and pretty soon, you’re talking big money". The senator would need to do some swift recalibrations were he confronted with today’s American public finances. Last month, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year ending September 30 had hit $1.7 trillion. That’s close to 7% of GDP. Shortly afterwards, the International Monetary Fund forecast that the deficit will continue at the same level for at least the next five years. Meanwhile, government debt has tripled since the senator’s day to around 120% of GDP. Investors don’t appear to share Senator Dirksen’s sense of irony in the face of these gargantuan numbers. After climbing steeply throughout 2022 and then stabilising in the first half of 2023, the market for U.S. Treasury bonds has sold off sharply again in the last three months, aggressively pushing up yields on long-dated bonds. Recent trading sessions have teetered on the disorderly, with the 30-year U.S Treasury yield rising above 5% amid intraday swings of 20 basis points or more. I explain what this alarming picture means for investors and citizens in my column &nbsp;here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; The case for a career in bond investing Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 27 October 2023 Last week, I was tasked with convincing a class of brilliant young MBA students at one of Europe’s leading business schools that they should consider a career in bond investing. It was not an easy sell. Bonds, I explained, traditionally serve three purposes. First, they deliver a positive income. That prompted polite guffaws. I should not have been surprised. In 2022, the aggregate U.S. market for fixed income securities notched up its worst annual performance since 1871, and U.S. Treasury bonds are currently on track for three consecutive calendar years of negative returns – something that has never happened before. Bonds contribute capital stability, I parried, in contrast to flighty equities. More sniggers at the back. I sensed familiarity with the recent fate of fixed income benchmarks such as Austria’s hundred-year government bond. That security, which was issued in 2017, is down around 75% from its peak valuation in late 2020. There was still fixed income’s trump card. Its third traditional function is as ballast: an asset class whose negative correlation with equities can diversify a portfolio and reduce overall risk without giving up returns. Then I remembered that in 2022 equities and bonds dropped in tandem, resulting in the worst performance for the classic 60:40 balanced portfolio since 1974. The private equity session was about to start down the hall. Some of the more ambitious students were beginning to slink towards the door. It was time for a change of tack. You can read the rest of my attempt to convince the students in my column here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; The Queen’s question returns with a vengeance Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 6 October 2023 “Why did no one see it coming?” That was the question Queen Elizabeth famously posed to economists in November 2008, six weeks into the biggest financial crisis in history. On that occasion, there was an obvious answer. The world’s leading central banks had spent the previous two decades focusing on low inflation, neglecting risks to financial stability. The British monarch, who died a year ago, is no longer able to put experts on the spot. But her question is back with a vengeance. This time, it is harder to dodge, since the thing policymakers failed to see coming was the resurgence of inflation itself – the very phenomenon that modern central banks are supposed to keep under control. I explain what went wrong - and how it might be fixed - in my column here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; The next revolution in monetary policy is underway Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 30 June 2023 Monetary policy, Milton Friedman said, acts on the economy with long and variable lags. Just as important for investors is that the reverse is also true. Monetary policy regimes evolve in response to the changing nature of prevailing economic challenges – though this also takes time. The great debate of the current era is whether the inflation-targeting central banks established in the 1990s are still fit for purpose in the ultra-financialised economies of the 2020s. In the past week, both the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements have made striking interventions. Investors should take note. The next revolution in monetary policy may be brewing. Start with the IMF. At the European Central Bank’s annual get-together in the Portuguese village of Sintra on Monday, Gita Gopinath, the fund’s deputy managing director, urged policymakers to confront what she called some “uncomfortable truths”. Foremost amongst these is that since central banks began hiking interest rates in late 2021 they have exposed a string of unexpected financial stresses. Last October, UK markets descended into turmoil as margin calls on leveraged investment strategies caused British pension funds to panic-sell government bonds. A month later a default by a South Korean Legoland theme park developer triggered an economy-wide credit crunch in the Asian country. Jitters caused by higher borrowing costs also contributed to the failures of lenders like SVB Financial and Signature Bank in the United States and Credit Suisse in Europe. Central banks can relatively easily limit the impact of problems arising in the financial sector. Containing the fallout from rate hikes in other parts of the economy is much more tricky, Gopinath warned. As if on cue it seems that Thames Water – the UK’s largest water and sewage utility, responsible for supplying nearly a third of the population of England and all of London – is on the brink of insolvency. The root problem is its inability to service 14 billion pounds of debt accumulated during the low-interest rate era. The impact of inflation-fighting rate hikes has quite literally reached the capital’s kitchen sinks. The rolling cascade of financial accidents has undermined the credibility of policymakers’ hawkish rhetoric. As a result, sizable gaps have regularly opened up between market expectations of future policy rates – as conveyed, for example, by Fed Funds futures in the United States – and central bankers’ own projections. Investors are sceptical that central banks can make good on their inflation-fighting promises.I explain why they are right to be in my column here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; Crypto is dead: long live crypto! Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 16 June 2023 Already reeling from the “Razzlekhan” scandal, punch-drunk from the collapse of TerraUSD, and floored by the implosion of FTX, cryptocurrencies were finally dealt a knockout blow last week by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The watchdog brought separate charges against two leading crypto companies, Binance and Coinbase Global, accusing them of operating unlicensed U.S. exchanges for unregistered financial securities and illegally commingling brokerage and clearing. In truth, the market for digital tokens like bitcoin was already out for the count. Prices have collapsed since the peak of the speculative mania in November 2021. The combined value of cryptocurrencies is down by nearly two-thirds. Trading volumes are less than 10% of their peak. In retrospect, it is obvious that these electronic securities were the most extreme beneficiaries of the “everything bubble” which propelled the valuations of financial assets with negligible or even non-existent cash flows to astronomical heights. The end of near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing and pandemic-era fiscal stimulus has sent prices crashing back to earth. Rising real interest rates have proved to be kryptonite for crypto, as for so many other speculative assets. Yet investors should think twice before writing crypto off completely. The normalisation of interest rates may have done for crypto in its most recent incarnation as a get-rich-quick scheme. But it might also be exactly what is needed to resurrect its original sales pitch as the technological breakthrough that would facilitate the global circulation of privately issued currencies capable of transferring economic value across time and space more safely, efficiently and freely than ever before. That may sound like a tall order. If crypto is to rise once more from the canvas, it will need to extricate itself from the reputational mire of a market structure that SEC Chairman Gary Gensler last week described as “rife with fraud, abuse, and noncompliance”. Digital currencies will also need to convince central bankers that they are not a threat to monetary policy or existing payments systems – something Facebook owner Meta Platforms’ ill-fated Libra project, for example, failed to do. Yet the underlying structural drivers of crypto’s popularity remain as powerful as ever.I explain how that is in my column here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; Securonomics is a fuzzy new lodestar for investors Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 2 June 2023 “Globalisation, as we once knew it, is dead.” This blunt assessment, delivered last week in Washington by Rachel Reeves, the UK Labour Party’s shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, is the simplest summary of what has happened to the framework that has governed global economic policy for the past three decades. The former Bank of England economist also coined the catchiest term for what is taking globalisation’s place: securonomics. In short, it means national security trumps economic efficiency. During the era of free trade and financial liberalisation, the politicians danced to the economists’ tune. Now it’s the other way round. To say this volte-face is important for investors is a colossal understatement. Almost nothing matters more. The definitive account of the principles governing the new policy landscape was set out by the White House at the end of April. Tellingly, it came not from the U.S. Treasury Secretary or the U.S. Trade Representative, but from the country’s top securocrat, Jake Sullivan. President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor explained that the era of unqualified support for free markets is over. Domestically, industrial policy is back. The state will explicitly subsidise “specific sectors that are foundational to economic growth (or) strategic from a national security perspective,” Sullivan explained. That principle underpins the Biden administration’s two main pieces of economic legislation of the past twelve months, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which aim to bolster the United States’ semiconductor and green energy industries, respectively. Internationally, meanwhile, free trade is no longer the pole star. Securing supply chains will take priority over minimising costs, and bilateral or regional trade agreements will be designed to support foreign and environmental policy. Friendshoring – the drive to source parts and manufactured goods from friendly countries – will replace offshoring. Sullivan’s 5,000-word speech devoted just three sentences to the World Trade Organization. What does this all mean for investors?I address that question in my column here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; AI boom could expose investors’ natural stupidity Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 19 May 2023 “My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence,” the Israeli psychologist Amos Tversky once quipped. “Me, I study natural stupidity.” The co-founder of behavioural economics, who died in 1996, did not live to see 2023, when more of his academic colleagues jumped on the AI bandwagon along with venture capitalists, corporate leaders, and stock jocks. But investors should pay closer attention to Tversky’s specialisation. Behavioural economics, which studies how psychological, emotional, and social factors affect human decision-making, has some important pointers for those hoping to cash in on AI. The first lesson is the most obvious: beware of bubbles. Since OpenAI released its ChatGPT chatbot last November, the steady flow of capital into all things AI-related has turned into a torrent. Shares in Nvidia, the world’s leading maker of chips used in creating AI, have surged more than 100% over the last six months. Software giant Microsoft has gained almost $500 billion in market value since announcing in February that it was incorporating AI into its Bing search engine. Investors in Alphabet added a cool $60 billion to the Google owner’s worth in a single day last week after CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled its new AI offering at the company’s annual I/O conference. Indeed, enthusiasm about AI has become the one ray of light piercing the stock market gloom created by the record-breaking rise in U.S. interest rates. SocGen analyst Manish Kabra calculated last week that, excluding AI-related gains, the S&amp;P 500 Index would be down 2% year-to-date. Instead, it was up 8%. The boom even has macroeconomic consequences. Irish Finance Minister Michael McGrath last week unveiled plans for a new 90-billion-euro sovereign wealth fund, largely funded by a corporate tax windfall from tech giants such as Apple and Microsoft which are domiciled in the country. For other companies, perceived vulnerabilities to AI can spell doom. Shares in Chegg cratered earlier this month when the maker of study materials admitted that so-called large language models such as ChatGPT were eating into its market. Orthodox asset pricing models suggest these wild gyrations reflect changing but rational assessments of future profitability. But behavioural economics has long furnished an alternative explanation by enumerating a rogues’ gallery of systematic flaws in human decision-making. These range from herding and overconfidence to confirmation bias and the fear of missing out. It’s a good moment for investors to be especially alert to the tendency of natural stupidity to drive stock market valuations to unrealistic – and therefore ultimately unprofitable – extremes. However, the most important lessons of behavioural economics relate to a more fundamental question: Will the new generation of AI do what it promises? I address that question in my column here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; Inflation’s real benefits beat its theoretical costs Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 5 May 2023 The Bank of England’s chief economist caught some serious flak last week for saying something self-evidently true, not just for the United Kingdom but for most of the developed world. Huw Pill declared on a podcast that some companies and workers needed to accept they were worse off. He is right. The economy has become poorer, in real terms, due to a barrage of real shocks over the past three years: the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war, and most recently a significant food price shock. The dilemma facing central banks – and therefore investors – is how to respond. Should monetary authorities act fast to stamp out the resulting inflation, or should they err on the dovish side and tolerate the current upward shift in the price level? In the era of inflation-targeting central banks, the answer may seem obvious. Inflation is always and everywhere a bad thing. Yet economic theory has a remarkably hard time identifying the social costs imposed by a rising price level. Economics textbooks used to state that one significant deadweight loss from inflation was “menu costs”: the waste of resources when companies have to regularly change their price levels. That always seemed minimal and must be almost irrelevant in the digital age. Another supposed drawback of rising prices was “shoe leather costs” – shorthand for the inconvenience of having to move money between deposit and savings accounts to preserve cash holdings. Now that smartphone users can switch banks with the swipe of a thumb, that idea sounds positively quaint. A more serious charge is the uncertainty that rising prices introduce into financial planning. But this is driven more by the volatility of inflation than its level, and is therefore a reason to avoid erratic or incompetent policymaking, rather than keeping inflation below a particular rate. Finally, there is the moralist’s argument that any reduction in the real value of the national monetary unit is essentially equivalent to theft. That ancient indictment basically dodges the question. There are winners and losers, and positive and negative economic effects, from devaluing the currency. The point of economic theory is to enable policymakers to analyse the tradeoffs. If the theoretical costs of inflation are elusive, the potential advantages it has to offer are more concrete. They also happen to relate directly to the two most important economic challenges facing advanced economies today.I explain what they are in my column here. Column&nbsp; |&nbsp; The Marrakech Express Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 21 April 2023 Early April in Washington, DC is famous for two time-honoured rituals. Down at the Tidal Basin there is the National Cherry Blossom Festival. A few blocks further north you can hear the International Monetary Fund tell visiting finance ministers, central bankers and financiers about the dire economic outlook for emerging markets.This year, the cherry blossom was spectacular. The IMF didn’t disappoint either. Its flagship Global Financial Stability Report noted that twelve emerging-market governments are already in financial trouble, and the foreign currency bonds of twenty more are trading at levels which have historically endangered countries’ ability to borrow. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva went further, warning that no fewer than sixty countries are at risk of debt distress.The reason for the seasonal gloom is that the IMF and World Bank regularly raise capital from their shareholders to fund concessional lending. This year, the IMF is asking donors to stump up more than $6 billion of additional contributions before the multilateral lenders' annual meeting in October. IMF bosses also remember the wilderness years of the early 2000s, when business dwindled to such an extent that the fund had to cut 15% of its staff and was nicknamed the TMF, or Turkish Monetary Fund, after its only sizeable remaining client. All in all, it never pays to paint too rosy a picture of emerging-market prospects.Yet investors should beware of paying too much attention to the dismal mood music. The reality is that after many years of lacklustre returns, emerging-market sovereign debt has proved one of the best-performing asset classes over the past year. There are good reasons to think there is more to come. I explain why in my column here. Article&nbsp; |&nbsp; 2019: Doomsday or Domesday? New Statesman |&nbsp; 2 January 2019 In October, 2019, Mario Draghi is due to come to the end of his eight-year term as President of the European Central Bank.&nbsp; He is in a race against time to avoid an unusual accolade for a central banker: never once to have raised interest rates during his tenure. In decades gone by, central bankers expected to earn their spurs by their expert navigation of the ebb and flow of the business cycle, skilfully steering the economy between the Scylla of recession and the Charybdis of inflation with the finely-tuned tiller of interest rate policy. For Mr Draghi, however, no such dexterity has been required.&nbsp; All he has done is cut rates – eight times, from 1.5% to zero.&nbsp; The reversal has never materialised. He is far from alone.&nbsp; The Bank of England’s Mark Carney has been even less busy.&nbsp; In the sixty-six months Carney has been in post as Governor, the tiresome chore of adjusting interest rates has troubled him for only three of them – and the policy rate remains a mere quarter of a percent above its lowest level in three hundred years. Yet the subdued activity levels at the ECB and the BOE are as nothing compared to the splendid lassitude of the Bank of Japan.&nbsp; Not only has its current governor Haruhiko Kuroda (in office since 2013) never raised rates; his immediate predecessor Masaaki Shirawaka, whose term began in 2008, didn’t either. This brief survey of three of the world’s premier central banks illustrates a striking fact about the current global economic conjuncture. GDP growth, inflation, and unemployment in the world’s most advanced economies have long since recovered to historically normal levels following the crisis of 2008.&nbsp; Yet their financial systems remain mired in a gigantic and unprecedented experiment – one which has resulted in a decade of monetary policy paralysis. Recent turbulence on the world’s stock markets suggests that many investors are nervous at the prospect of the central bankers’ bringing this Great Monetary Experiment to a close.&nbsp; Less fretted over – but no less problematic – are the consequences of allowing it to continue. You can read what I think they are in my latest article in the New Statesman. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; The Global Economy: Status Anxiety New Statesman |&nbsp; 27 April 2018 Last weekend saw 2018’s first big conclave of the global economic policy-making elite at the Spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund’s governing board in Washington, DC.&nbsp; The world’s central bankers, finance ministers, and investors gathered to hear the global financial watchdog’s latest update on the state of the world economy. The news was positive. World GDP growth is forecast to be just under 4 percent both this year and next – stretching the global expansion into its eleventh year.&nbsp; China and India, the great juggernauts of the emerging world, should grow at around 6.5 and 7.5 percent respectively.&nbsp; The US – the largest economy in the world – will start to benefit from President Trump’s opening of the fiscal floodgates, and as a result, seems set to break the 1991-2001 record for its longest postwar expansion.&nbsp; Even in Brexit-beleaguered Britain, the unemployment rate has just hit its lowest level since 1975. Yet rather than reveling in this bonfire of the economic record books, expert opinion in the US capital – like the public mood across many much of the West – was strangely full of foreboding.&nbsp; Amongst the general public, statistics such as those just quoted seem curiously at odds with the lived experience of a joyless recovery hallmarked by austerity and uncertainty.&nbsp; The experts themselves have more faith that the numbers reflect reality.&nbsp; But amongst the professional forecasters too there is a nagging sense that the good times cannot last – that there is another downturn just around the corner, and that the longer we go without a recession, the more likely it is that there will be one next year. Are these fears of false progress and impending doom misplaced, or are we indeed living in a fool’s paradise?&nbsp; Where does this mismatch between perception and reality come from?&nbsp; The answer is to be found, I think, in two critical features of the global recovery since 2008. I explain what they are in my latest article in the New Statesman, available here. Article&nbsp; | &nbsp; Bitcoin should serve as a wake-up call to our flawed financial systems Daily Telegraph |&nbsp; 4 December 2017 The great American financial historian Charles Kindleberger used to say that after six decades of meticulous research into the origins of speculative bubbles, he had concluded that there was but a single constant: “There is nothing so disturbing to one’s well-being and judgement as to see a friend get rich.” Well: if any of you have friends who got in early on Bitcoin – the price of which has quadrupled in the last six months – you must be suffering from a severe loss of mental equilibrium. Yet it is worth looking past Bitcoin as the latest get-rich-quick scheme, and focusing instead on the deeper drivers of the global fascination with the crypto-currency phenomenon.&nbsp; For if he were still alive, I am sure that Professor Kindleberger would judge Bitcoin to represent the ground zero at which three of the most important historical forces at work in the world today converge. I explain what they are, and why Bitcoin might save – rather than displace – the traditional financial system, in an article in The Daily Telegraph published on December 5, 2017. Op-Ed&nbsp; | &nbsp; Back to the Future on Inflation Financial Times |&nbsp; 28 July 2017 Another month, another impressively low unemployment number, but another flaccid inflation print. &nbsp;No wonder the US Federal Reserve is&nbsp;baffled. Modern macroeconomic theory depends upon the famous Phillips curve, and its pressure cooker model of the inflationary process. Let the economy run too hot, and inflation is sure to follow. Let the pressure drop too low, and wage and price growth will ease. Yet in the US, unemployment is at multi-year lows but inflation is nowhere in sight. In the UK it is hardly better. In Japan it is even worse. Across the developed economies, the Phillips curve has gone ignominiously flat. The world’s leading central bankers are scratching their heads. I explained why older and less fashionable theories of inflation may be a more useful guide to the future in today’s circumstances in an op-ed in the Financial Times. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; It’s the Young Wot Won It! New Statesman |&nbsp; 4 July 2017 It’s the young wot won it! All right, I know – Labour didn’t actually win the election. Nevertheless, it certainly felt like a loss for the Tories; and it’s equally certain that young people turned out in large numbers, and that age was one of the only characteristics reliably associated with the way people voted. What is it that the young want from their representatives – and are the policies on offer from either main party likely to provide it? I ask these questions in my latest article in the New Statesman. &nbsp;It is available here. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; Brexit and the City New Statesman |&nbsp; 12 February 2017 The City of London has always (and not accidentally) baffled outsiders.&nbsp; But Brexit has draped a new question over its age-old mystique: is London’s financial sector the UK’s trump card, or its Achilles’s heel, in the negotiations over leaving the EU? I explore this question in my latest column in the New Statesman. &nbsp;It is available here. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; Basta! New Statesman |&nbsp; 12 December 2016 What a difference four hours makes. At six in the evening last Sunday, the champagne corks were popping in Brussels.&nbsp; Norbert Hofer, the candidate of the far-Right Freedom Party, had just conceded defeat in the Austrian presidential election. By ten o’clock, however, the bubbles were going flat.&nbsp; The exit polls showed that in Italy, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was going down to a heavy defeat in the referendum he had called and championed on constitutional change. Together, these two results revealed a critically important truth about the rise of populism in Europe and its relationship to its troubled economic model. I explain what it is in my latest column in the New Statesman. &nbsp;It is available here. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; Mr Trump Goes to Washington New Statesman |&nbsp; 19 November 2016 Donald Trump has won the US presidency with a campaign that broke all the rules. Is the stage therefore set for America’s economic policy to take off in an equally unprecedented direction – and should the rest of us be fearful or elated? These questions cannot yet be answered with any certainty: so far, not much is known about who will take the most important economic posts in the new administration, nor what detailed policies they and the president-elect advocate. But we know enough from Trump’s campaign pledges and the Republican Party’s better-known conventional platform to make some educated guesses. I make mine in my latest article in the New Statesman. &nbsp;It is available here. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; Brexit: Less About the BOE, More About the EBI New Statesman |&nbsp; 11 August 2016 As far as the economic consequences of the Brexit vote are concerned, the Bank of England has seen enough. Having held fire at its meeting in July in the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum, the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee voted unanimously on 3 August to fire a three-barrelled stimulus bazooka. I was not in the City that day but in the Lakes, holidaying with a brilliant scientist friend who is a director of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge­shire – one of the world’s leading centres for genomics research. I came away convinced that the true economic impact of Brexit has less to do with the short-term gyrations of interest rates and the financial markets and more to do with our long-term ability to maintain our position at the technological frontier. When it comes to Brexit, we should be worrying less about institutions such as the Bank and more about institutions such as the EBI. In my latest Real Money column for the New Statesman, I discuss why the UK’s long term economic future depends not on the monetary tonics of the BOE but on maintaining our justified reputation as a tolerant society that is open to foreign trade, foreign capital, foreign ideas and the foreign people who come up with them. &nbsp;You can read it here. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; No Economy is an Island New Statesman |&nbsp; 22 July 2016 If you believe Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands, the Brexit vote has plunged Britain into chaos. The UK, he concluded a few days after the referendum, “has collapsed politically, ­monetarily, constitutionally and economically”. I can’t speak to politics or the constitution; but monetarily and economically, this view is wrong (or at least incomplete) in one crucial respect. It fails to see that no country’s economic fate is determined unilaterally. What happens next elsewhere – and in the eurozone especially – will be just as important as what happens in the UK. In my latest Real Money column for the New Statesman, I discuss why. &nbsp;You can read it here. Op-Ed&nbsp; | &nbsp; There is life in sovereign bonds if you know where to look Financial Times |&nbsp; 12 July 2016 Next year will see the 850th anniversary of one of the most important financial innovations ever conceived: the invention of the government bond. It was in 1167 that the Republic of Venice became the first modern state to borrow from its citizens in a formal manner, taking a loan from ninety of its leading families.&nbsp; Within a few years, the terms of such loans had begun to be standardised; and within a century, a lively trade in discrete tranches of the consolidated national debt was being carried on at the foot of the Rialto bridge.&nbsp; The global government bond markets had been born. Over time, such sovereign borrowing became a hallmark of the most economically advanced nations, and the most important means of affording individual citizens a share in their general prosperity.&nbsp; By the end of the twentieth century, a vast financial infrastructure had been constructed furnishing pensions to the deserving retired, insurance to the daring entrepreneur, and income to the thrifty saver and the idle rentier.&nbsp; It was all built on the foundations of government bonds: the risk-free asset, whose returns rely not on the shifting fortunes of any individual company, but on the health of the economy as a whole and the quality of the sovereign’s policies. Since 2008, however, the feet of this mighty Colossus have turned to clay. &nbsp;In the G10, the average yield on the benchmark 10-year bond has shrivelled from 4.3% in mid-2007 to 0.5% today. &nbsp;Developed economy government bond markets are in a coma: nearly $12 trillion-worth&nbsp;of government bonds now trade at a negative yield. Yet all is not lost for sovereign bonds. &nbsp;Quite the opposite, in fact. I explain how and why government bonds should remain central to the plans of income-oriented investors in an op-ed in The Financial Times published on July 12, 2016. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; Brexit: What Next? New Statesman |&nbsp; 4 July 2016 England has just been ejected from Euro 2016 by Iceland. Is this an early example of the hapless future that lies ahead for Britain now that we have opted for self-imposed exile from the richest economic zone on earth?&nbsp; Or is it a demonstration of the mighty feats that even the tiniest of nations can achieve once freed from the EU yoke? The debate on the economic implications of Brexit prior to last week’s vote was fuelled by fantastic claims of epochal economic disaster and transformative economic opportunity made by both sides.&nbsp; What does a more sober assessment of our prospects look like on the morning after? In my latest Real Money column for the New Statesman, I discuss the economic and political consequences of the UK’s vote to leave the EU. &nbsp;You can read it here. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; Revolution at the IMF? New Statesman |&nbsp; 5 June 2016 What has come over the International Monetary Fund? Not content with playing the good cop to Europe’s bad in the ongoing Greek crisis – in which it has been arguing for more debt relief and less austerity – the Fund has just published an article in its in-house magazine by three of its leading researchers entitled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”. Their answer is “Yes”. In my latest article in the New Statesman, I explore why – and whether the IMF’s mea culpa will finally win over its critics in the emerging markets or not. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; The Coming Storm New Statesman |&nbsp; 21 February 2016 When does a stock-market slide become a crash? And when does a financial crash spark an economic crisis? At the end of last year, few investors were giving much thought to such nice distinctions. Less than two months into 2016, with the leading global equity indices having dropped between 10 and 25 per cent at their worst, these questions are on everyone’s lips. In my latest article in the New Statesman, I discuss why I think we are entering a precarious period for both markets and monetary policy. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; The Market’s New Year Blues New Statesman |&nbsp; 13 January 2016 This year’s January sales seem to have extended to the world’s stock markets. A week in to 2016, you could buy the FTSE for 6 per cent less than on New Year’s Eve. It is the worst start to the year in at least two decades. What is behind these New Year blues? &nbsp;My latest Real Money column in the New Statesman discusses the answers given by Martin Taylor, one of the most successful investors of the past two decades, as he decided to close his Nevsky Fund this month. Op-Ed&nbsp; | &nbsp; Do not discount a run on sterling Financial Times |&nbsp; 28 October 2015 Is sterling riding for a fall? &nbsp;The UK’s current account deficit is certainly worryingly large. But the real reason for sterling’s vulnerability lies not in the current account deficit itself but in its cause. &nbsp;Exploring what that is leads to a less conventional perspective on currency valuation, but one that is vitally important in today’s financially globalised world. You can read more in the Markets Insight column I published in the Financial Times on October 28, 2015. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; Stumbling Stock Markets: The Toils of Perversity New Statesman |&nbsp; 26 August 2015 The steep and synchronised falls in the world’s main stock markets on Monday, August 24, 2015 caught investors by surprise.&nbsp; Yet in light of the disappointing economic fundamentals of the past few years, the real question is perhaps not why markets stumbled but why asset prices were so high in the first place. The answer to that question is simple – but ultimately paradoxical.&nbsp; You can read what it is in my latest Real Money column in the New Statesman. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; Greece and the Future of the International Economic Order New Statesman |&nbsp; 9 July 2015 What is really at issue in the Greek crisis, and what do the latest developments mean for Greece, Europe, and the rest of the world? I offer some answers to these questions in the July 9, 2015 issue&nbsp;of the New Statesman. You can read the article here. Op-Ed&nbsp; | &nbsp; Watch out for whales Financial Times |&nbsp; 16 February 2015 The US — finally — is back. Strong growth, falling unemployment, rising confidence and a buoyant stock market all say so. The rest of the world, meanwhile, seems stuck in the doldrums. Should this divergent dynamic concern investors? I think it should.&nbsp; You can find out why in the Markets Insight column I published in the Financial Times February 16, 2015. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; The Oil Price Collapse New Statesman |&nbsp; 29 January 2015 The past few months have brought a spree of frightening developments in the global economy. There’s been the slow crash of the Chinese property market, the eurozone’s slide into deflation and the relentless strengthening of the US dollar, to begin with. But there is no doubt what the biggest and most baffling development of all has been: the collapse in the price of oil, from more than $100 per barrel as recently as last September to less than $50 per barrel today. Why has it happened – and what does it mean?&nbsp; You can read my best guesses in an Observations piece I just published in the New Statesman here. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; Secular Stagnation: What is it? New Statesman |&nbsp; 23 October 2014 What is behind the prolonged economic slump in the Eurozone?&nbsp; Economists tell us it’s because of something called “secular stagnation”.&nbsp; But as I explain in my latest Real Money column in the New Statesman, that’s just another way of saying we don’t know the answer… Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; Flash Boys and the Law of Unintended Consequences New Statesman |&nbsp; 24 April 2014 Michael Lewis’s new book Flash Boys is quite rightly generating a lot of attention because it argues that High Frequency Trading is a scam. I think that Lewis’s story holds an even more important lesson, however, concerning one of the seminal problems of our age: the unintended consequences of technological innovation. You can read why in my latest Real Money column in the New Statesman. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; Bitcoin is Pointless as a Currency, but it Could Change the World Anyway Wired |&nbsp; 31 March 2014 Sovereign governments everywhere are petrified. An ingenious new invention that allows people to make payments across borders without leaving a trace in the official monetary system is spreading like wildfire. Its workings are so clever that few understand them. It’s backed by some of the leading entrepreneurs of the day. The embattled establishment is warning that the state’s right to regulate finance is being undermined. Bitcoin, 2014? Indeed.&nbsp; But as it happens, this was also precisely the playbook for the birth of modern banking in sixteenth century Europe. You can read here what I think this Old World precedent has to teach us about the prospects for bitcoin in an opinion piece I published in Wired on March 31, 2014. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; A Forgotten Scotsman’s 300-Year-Old Solution to Alex Salmond’s Money Problems New Statesman |&nbsp; 12 December 2013 What have a forgotten Scots genius and the partisans of Bitcoin got to teach Alex Salmond? Find out in my Real Money column in the New Statesman. Column&nbsp; | &nbsp; Is Britain Really Booming? New Statesman | 30 January 2014 Sort of. &nbsp;But the economy is still smaller than it was six years ago. In my latest column for the New Statesman I explain that recent economic data have indeed been looking up – but that the bigger picture is much less encouraging. Article&nbsp; | &nbsp;Time for the Direct Approach (with Robert Skidelsky) New Statesman |&nbsp; 1 March 2012 On March 1, 2012, Robert Skidelsky and I published an article in the New Statesman arguing that printing money and cutting taxes – examples of the indirect approach to promoting growth currently favoured by the government – are not enough. &nbsp;The Chancellor should use his 2012 budget to try an alternative: upgrading the Green Investment Bank to a full-scale British Investment Bank that can provide a direct stimulus to the recovery and rebalancing of the UK economy. The article was No.1 on PoliticsHome‘s Top Ten Political Must-Reads on March 1, 2012. You can read it here. Op-Ed&nbsp; |&nbsp; Urgently needed: a Plan C to save Britain’s economy (with Robert Skidelsky) Financial Times |&nbsp; 24 November 2011 On Thursday, November 24, 2011, Robert Skidelsky and I published an op-ed in the Financial Times, arguing that QE has not done much to help the UK economy, and looking forward to the Chancellor’s Autumn budget statement next Thursday. You can read it here. What could a Plan C look like?&nbsp; One idea that we believe could both boost demand and assist the long term rebalancing of the UK economy – all without damaging the government’s credibility on fiscal matters – is the establishment of a new British Investment Bank. The Centre for Global Studies recently published practical proposals for what such a bank would look like and do.&nbsp; You can read them here. Article&nbsp; | &nbsp;Cold turkey is the only option for the developed world Investment Week |&nbsp; 25 August 2011 On August 10, 2011, Mervyn King delivered an eloquent diagnosis of recent global economic developments at the press conference for the Bank of England’s August Inflation Report. On August 25, 2011, I published a column in Investment Week discussing Dr. King’s analysis, and asking what policies are required for things to turn out better. You can read the article here. Op-Ed&nbsp; |&nbsp; Osborne’s austerity gamble is fast being found out (with Robert Skidelsky) Financial Times |&nbsp; 2 August 2011 On Monday, August 2, 2011, Robert Skidelsky and I published an article in the Financial Times questioning whether the financial markets are changing their tune on austerity, and what this means for the UK – the pioneer of austerity as the mainstay of ecomic strategy in the post-crisis era. You can read it here. Article&nbsp; |&nbsp; For a National Investment Bank (with Robert Skidelsky) New York Review of Books |&nbsp; 28 April 2011 Robert Skidelsky and I have an article in the April 28 2011 issue of the New York Review of Books proposing that President Obama should establish a National Investment Bank in order both to promote the long term development and rebalancing of the US economy, and to help offset the effects of coming fiscal retrenchment. You can read it here. Op-Ed&nbsp; |&nbsp; A way out of Britain’s growth dilemma (with Robert Skidelsky) Financial Times |&nbsp; 21 March 2011 On Monday, on March 21, 2011, Robert Skidelsky and I published an op-ed in the Financial Times, arguing that the UK government should establish a National Investment Bank in order to promote the growth and rebalancing of the UK economy and to help stabilise confidence and demand. Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books&nbsp; &nbsp;Articles&nbsp; &nbsp; Media&nbsp; &nbsp;Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact Archive&nbsp; |&nbsp; Articles,... http://felixmartin.org/Archive-Book-reviews Mon, 26 Jul 2021 15:18:23 +0000 Felix Martin 409333 Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books &nbsp; &nbsp;Articles &nbsp; Media&nbsp; &nbsp;Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact Archive&nbsp; |&nbsp; Book reviews Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; &nbsp;Gambling Man: The Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son &nbsp;by Lionel BarberThe Financial Times |&nbsp; 16 October 2024 At the very beginning of Gambling Man, his biography of Masayoshi “Masa” Son, the founder of Japanese investment firm SoftBank, Lionel Barber concedes that his subject is “probably the most powerful mogul of the twenty-first century who is not a household name”. The rest of the book proceeds to prove how absurd a paradox this is.Son is, after all, a biographer’s dream. His career is an almost surreal string of personal highs and lows. Zelig-like, he has been present at - and indeed often responsible for - almost every big turning point in global tech over the past four decades. This is a man, Barber, a former editor of the FT, reminds us, who has been “the single largest foreign investor in capitalist America and communist China; the biggest start-up funder in the world, and the boss of one of the top ten most indebted firms, continually threatening a financial implosion”. You can read my review of the book here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; &nbsp;Money: A Story of Humanity by David McWilliamsThe Financial Times |&nbsp; 4 September&nbsp;2024 “Not one man in a million understands the nature of money — and you meet him every day”. &nbsp;I imagine that this apocryphal quip from the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson will draw a few wry smiles from Financial Times readers. After all, they are probably as interested as anyone in money’s mysterious secrets. They are also likely well aware that there is never a shortage of authors promising to reveal them.The last few years alone have seen the publication of 2022’s Money in One Lesson by Gavin Jackson; 2020’s Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein; and 2016’s Money Changes Everything by William Goetzmann, to name but a few. There was even an effort by some bloke called Martin. That’s before one gets to modern staples such as David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) let alone classics like J M Keynes’s Treatise on Money (1930) or the granddaddy of them all, Georg Simmel’s terrifying and impenetrable The Philosophy of Money (1900).Yet in defiance of Professor Samuelson’s cynicism, David McWilliams’s Money: A Story of Humanity succeeds in offering an enjoyable and insightful addition to this bulging canon. That’s partly because of McWilliams’s unusual background. A classically trained economist who has worked both as a central banker and on the financial markets, he is the founder of Kilkenomics — the world’s first festival of economics and stand-up comedy. But it’s even more to do with the book’s skilfully executed approach. You can read my review of the book here. Book review&nbsp; | &nbsp; Why Politicians Lie About Trade by Dmitry Grozoubinski and How The World Ran Out of Everything by Peter S. GoodmanThe Financial Times |&nbsp; 16 July 2024 As the World Trade Organization approaches its 30th birthday on New Year’s Day, 2025, the international trading system is in crisis.The world’s largest economic blocs — the US, the EU, and China — are locked in an escalating tripartite tariff war. The UK has left the EU’s single market. The Covid pandemic saw unprecedented disruption to the flows of goods around the world. National security and decarbonisation have emerged as priorities in stark competition with free trade.What these winds of change blowing through the global trading system mean is nicely summed up by Dmitry Grozoubinski early on in his new book Why Politicians Lie About Trade : “while you may have chosen to take little interest in trade policy, trade policy is increasingly taking an interest in you.” You can read my review of these books&nbsp;here. Book review&nbsp; | &nbsp; The Unaccountability Machine by Dan DaviesThe Financial Times |&nbsp; 4 April 2024 Waiting to board a flight recently, I witnessed a stark example of a phenomenon at the heart of The Unaccountability Machine. A fellow passenger had been refused boarding and was pleading with the airline attendant. The attendant was obviously sympathetic — but the refusal was company policy. It was as frustrating for her as for the passenger, but there was unfortunately nothing she could do.We were witnessing what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink”: a situation in which a human system delegates decision-making to a rule book rather than an identifiable individual. If something goes wrong, no one is held to account.The starting point of Davies’s entertaining, insightful book is that the uncontrolled proliferation of accountability sinks is one of the central drivers of what historian Adam Tooze calls the “polycrisis” of the twenty-first century. Their influence reaches far beyond frustrated customers endlessly on hold to “computer says no” service departments. In finance, banking crises regularly recur — yet few individual bankers are found to be at fault. If politicians’ promises flop, meanwhile, they complain they have no power. The Deep State is somehow to blame.You can read my review of the book here. Book review&nbsp; | &nbsp; The Age of Prediction by Igor Tulchinsky and Christopher E. MasonThe Financial Times |&nbsp; 30 Aug 2023 “Humanity has entered a new era.” That is the bold claim with which quant investor Igor Tulchinsky and Cornell professor of genomics Christopher E. Mason begin The Age of Prediction — their ambitious new survey of how predictive algorithms are changing the world.Its publication could hardly be better timed. The public first became aware that something big was happening in the world of AI back in 2016, when Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo program defeated the reigning world champion at Go. Four years later, the company’s AlphaFold program solved one of&nbsp;the biggest puzzles in modern biology: the challenge&nbsp;of&nbsp;predicting the molecular structures into which proteins fold, based only on the sequences&nbsp;of&nbsp;their constituent amino acids.Then late last year came the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — the first of&nbsp;a flurry&nbsp;of&nbsp;Large Language Models that exhibit freakish abilities to sustain human-like conversations, and have left the famous Turing test for dust. Even the experts can’t agree whether we should be tantalised or terrified by the machine learning revolution evidently underway.But what exactly does it consist of? The Age of&nbsp;Prediction avoids getting bogged down in the debate over what actually counts as AI. Instead, it goes directly to the source and identifies the three big changes which in practice lie behind the startling achievements of the last decade.You can read my review of the book here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian The Financial Times |&nbsp; 25 April 2023 One of the centrepieces of UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s March 2023 Budget was the creation of 12 new Investment Zones — specially designated geographical areas which will benefit from tax breaks and other incentives intended to hot-house investment and innovation. Supporters hailed the scheme for finally making good on the government’s elusive manifesto promise of “leveling up”. Sceptics dismissed it as window-dressing aimed at reviving the ruling Conservative party’s polling numbers in the north.The aim of leading intellectual historian Quinn Slobodian’s new book is to convince us that special investment zones such as these in fact represent something more profound — and much more sinister. They are, he argues, just the respectable face of what he terms ‘crack-up capitalism’: the strategy of “punching holes in the territory of the nation-state, creating zones of exception with different laws and often no democratic oversight”.&nbsp; Behind them is massed a powerful, tenacious, and well-resourced intellectual movement that has for seventy years been devoted to rejecting the fundamental principles of democratic governance and the social market economy in favour of a libertarian, radical capitalist alternative.&nbsp; They are the entry-level drug to Peter Thiel’s dream of seaborne, law-lite, start-up nations. You can read my review of the book here. Book review&nbsp; | &nbsp; Escape From Model Land&nbsp;by Erica Thompson The Guardian |&nbsp; 30 December 2022 “The only function of economic forecasting,” wrote the great American economist John Kenneth Galbraith, “is to make astrology look respectable.”* It is characteristic of Erica Thompson’s sprightly and highly original new book on the uses and abuses of mathematical modeling that she dares to turn Galbraith’s verdict on its head. &nbsp; The mediaeval practice of casting horoscopes, she shows in one typically engaging section which illustrates many of her most important themes, has a surprising amount to teach us about the modern practice of using mathematical models to guide policy. The overall topic is an exceptionally important and timely one.&nbsp; The COVID pandemic, the climate crisis, and the GFC are just three glaring examples of how fundamental mathematical modelling has become to decision-making in many critical areas of modern life. You can read my review of it for The Guardian here. *&nbsp; Professor James K. Galbraith - son of John Kenneth Galbraith - kindly wrote to me subsequent to the publication of this review with a correction.&nbsp; Although regularly attributed to his father, Professor Galbraith explains that this remark is in fact due to Ezra Solomon, a Stanford professor who seved on President Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisors.&nbsp; “It’s not a bad line,” he writes, “but my father had plenty of others; he can afford it.” Book review&nbsp; | &nbsp; Free Market by Jacob Soll The Guardian |&nbsp; 30 September 2022 Strange things are afoot in the world of economic policy these days. Liz Truss is, by her own account, Margaret Thatcher’s biggest admirer and a fanatical devotee of economic liberalisation.&nbsp; Yet the very first act of the new Prime Minister was to enact the largest single government intervention in the UK’s history – a price cap for retail energy markets expected to cost the Treasury more than the entire NHS budget.&nbsp; It is not an isolated case. The flagship fiscal policy of Truss’s immediate predecessor as Tory Prime Minister – “leveling up” – was essentially an admission that free markets cannot be left to their own devices in allocating investment across regions.&nbsp; In the world of money and finance, the era of Quantitative Easing has effectively nationalized large parts of the world’s major bond markets. &nbsp; In international trade, meanwhile, the United States has morphed into the world’s leading protectionist power – whilst communist China is toasted in Davos as the last great champion of free trade. Forget strange things – it’s more like Stranger Things.&nbsp; Global economic policy seems to have stumbled through a gate to the Upside Down. Yet how surprised should we really be by these flagrant U-turns and blatant inconsistencies?&nbsp; Free Market: The History of An Idea – a sprightly new history of economic liberalism by the leading intellectual historian Jacob Soll – argues that if we understood our own economic tradition a little better, the answer would be “Not very”. You can read my review of it for The Guardian here. Book review&nbsp; | &nbsp; The Currency of Politics&nbsp;by Stefan Eich Financial Times |&nbsp; 2 August 2022 2022 is turning out to be the year that puts the politics back into monetary policy.For 30 years or more, inflation was quiescent – even despite the violent shocks of the tech crash and the global financial crisis. As a result, even the unprecedented monetary policies implemented after 2008 failed to provoke much real controversy.But this year, things have changed. With inflation topping 9 per cent in the UK and US, the questions of when and by how much interest rates should rise – and who will be the winners and losers when they do – are back at the top of the political agenda.That is just the start.&nbsp; Public satisfaction with the Bank of England’s performance hit the lowest on record last month.&nbsp; Liz Truss, the leading candidate to the UK’s next Prime Minister, has taken note, and pledged to review the central bank’s mandate.&nbsp; The once sacrosanct idea of monetary policy independence is now explicitly under threat.How should we evaluate these radical developments?&nbsp; Stefan Eich’s new book provides a splendidly clear framework: you can read my review of it for the Financial Times here. Book review&nbsp; | &nbsp; The Price of Time&nbsp;by Edward Chancellor Reuters Breakingviews |&nbsp; 8 July 2022 Edward Chancellor’s erudition, expertise, and wit are no secrets to readers of his Breakingviews columns.&nbsp; Some of you may not be aware, however, that he also has an eerie sense of timing. In 1999 he published “Devil Take the Hindmost”, his superlative history of speculative manias.&nbsp; Within a year, the dot-com bubble had burst.&nbsp; His next book, published in 2005, prophesied that it was “Crunch Time for Credit”. Eighteen months later, the biggest banking crisis in history had begun.&nbsp; Now, Chancellor has given us “The Price of Time”, a blistering polemic against the evils of artificially low interest rates. Right on cue, the gravy train of ultra-loose monetary policy has come to a halt. Perhaps you should therefore not just buy this book but sell all your stocks. In The Price of Time, Chancellor addresses the biggest economic question of the past fifteen years. Have the experimental monetary policies pursued by the world’s leading central banks since the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 been a miracle cure or an epochal mistake? You can find out what his answer is in my review for Reuters Breakinviews here. Book review&nbsp; | &nbsp; Cogs and Monsters by Diane Coyle, and The New Economics by Steve Keen Financial Times |&nbsp; 11 November 2021 The question of whether economics needs reform never seems to go away. The reason is simple.&nbsp; It is that the ultimate subject matter of economics is of intense interest to virtually everyone on the planet: nothing more nor less than how human society really works – and how it might be made to work better. For equally obvious reasons, every new social and economic crisis gives the debate a fresh dose of adrenaline – and the COVID pandemic has been no exception. There could not be a better time, therefore, for Diane Coyle and Steve Keen to set out their respective visions of how to make economics fit for the twenty-first century in their new books, Cogs and Monsters and The New Economics. Coyle and Keen are both distinguished academic economists.&nbsp; But there the similarities end. Coyle is the ultimate establishment insider, both in intellectual (Harvard PhD, Cambridge chair) and professional (ex-UK Treasury, CBE, numerous public appointments) terms.&nbsp; Her critiques of&nbsp;economics over the past two decades have been subtle, measured, and practical.&nbsp; Previous salvos, though rich in serious argument, have travelled under playful titles: The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters and GDP: a Brief but Affectionate History. Keen, by contrast, is an inveterate maverick.&nbsp; A leading light of&nbsp;heterodox economics, he carved out his academic career in unfashionable university departments (UWA in Australia; Kingston in the UK).&nbsp; The closest he has deigned to come to the establishment is his current tilt at the Australian Senate under the banner&nbsp;of&nbsp;the mold-breaking New Liberals Party. Rather than diplomatic niceties, he revels in Antipodean bluntness: the title&nbsp;of&nbsp;his most famous book is Debunking Economics. You can read about the visions of these two very different authors for the future of economics in my review of their books published on November 11, 2021 in the Financial Times here. Book review&nbsp; | &nbsp; Bettering Humanomics by Deidre Nansen McCloskey Financial Times |&nbsp; 27 May 2021 It is no secret that the glory days of the kind of economics many of us learned at university are long gone. The mighty edifice of neoclassical micro erected by Samuelson, Becker, and Stigler – with its hyper-rational homo economicus operating within a crystalline architecture of preferences, incentives, and constraints – went first. &nbsp; It disintegrated following sustained assault by the behavioural school of Kahnemann, Thaler, and Sunstein.&nbsp; By the turn of the millennium, it was out with the hard-nosed regulatory economists of the 80s and 90s, and in with behavioural insights and Nudge Units. As for traditional macro – whether of the Saltwater Neo-Keynesian or the Freshwater New Classical flavours – that flamed out in spectacular fashion in 2008 when, as the Queen herself famously observed, it failed to predict the biggest economic crisis in history.&nbsp; It took a decade for policy-makers to desert the old doctrines explicitly, but there is little doubt today that the Biden administration’s lodestar is more MMT than JMK or RBC. Yet are these revolutions really the answer to the shortcomings of Old School Econ 101?&nbsp; For more than four decades, Deidre Nansen McCloskey – professor emerita of no fewer than six separate disciplines at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a truly unclassifiable scholar who has made major contributions to economic theory, history, methodology, and statistics – has been arguing that the problems run deeper.&nbsp; What economics needs to fulfil its unparalleled potential as the premier science of human progress, she insists, is the rediscovery of its origins as the discipline which successfully marries the methods of the sciences and the humanities. Professor McCloskey explains why in her new book, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science. I reviewed it in the Financial Times on May 27, 2021. You can read my review here. Book review&nbsp; | &nbsp; The World for Sale&nbsp;by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy Financial Times |&nbsp; 2 March 2021 With the reflation trade suddenly ripping through the exchanges, a $1.9tn stimulus bill steaming through the US Congress, and “Dr Copper” bursting through $9,000 a tonne to prices not seen since the heady days of 2011, the commodity markets are headline news again.&nbsp; Could there be a better moment for Javier Blas and Jack Farchy’s rollicking new account of those markets’ recent history to land on investors’ desks? It’s as if the Bloomberg News reporters (and former FT journalists) have picked up not just a rich archive of ripping yarns from their years interviewing the industry’s leading traders — but some of their uncanny sense of timing too. Commodities have not always been a hot topic. In 1998, I landed my first proper job, as bag-carrier to the head of the energy and mining department at the World Bank.&nbsp; Back then, commodity markets seemed in terminal decline. The oil price had plummeted by 45 per cent over the previous 18 months. The mood in commodity-producing developing countries was apocalyptic. &nbsp; The Bank was on a mission to convince its clients that the good old days were not coming back: privatisation and reform were the only ways forward. At every meeting, we would pull out a chart of the real-terms price of oil over the previous nine decades. The boom times of the last two decades were a historical aberration, we would explain. Oil at $10 a barrel was here to stay. We were of course spectacularly wrong. In December 1998, the oil price bounced, and then more than doubled in the next 12 months. It was just getting started. The 2000s witnessed a supercycle the like of which the world had never seen before — with the oil price topping out at $145 a barrel in June 2008. We had bottom-ticked the biggest commodity bull market in history. At the core of The World For Sale: Money, Power, and The Traders Who Barter The Earth’s Resources is the story of how this historic boom catapulted a group of previously low-key international commodity trading houses — the likes of Cargill, Vitol, Trafigura, and Glencore — to extraordinary financial wealth and political power. My review of the book was published in the Financial Times on March 2, 2021. If you have a subscription, you can read it here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; Under the Influence by Robert Frank New Statesman |&nbsp; 18 March 2020 Behavioural economics – that branch of the subject which rejects the hyper-rational construct of homo economicus in favour of a more realistic understanding of human behaviour – is now so firmly a part of mainstream policy design that it seems hard to believe that two decades ago almost no one outside of the profession had heard of it. That changed in 2002, when the Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman was awarded a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work with Amos Tversky on integrating the real-world foibles of human psychology into economic analysis.&nbsp; Then in 2008, in their monster best-seller Nudge, the Chicago professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein introduced the wonderful possibility that clever policy might actually subvert the innate cognitive biases identified by Kahneman and Tversky to achieve the Holy Grail of liberal government: getting people to make better choices of their own accord. What is not widely understood, however, is that Thaler and Sunstein’s nudge theory was only one half of the behavioural economics revolution.&nbsp; The other half has thus far made much more limited inroads into the public’s consciousness.&nbsp; With any luck, however, that is about to change; because its story is told in Under the Influence – an invaluable new book from Cornell University’s Robert Frank, another of the founding fathers of behavioural economics.&nbsp; If policy-makers have any sense, this book will be as important a manual in the 2020s as Nudge was in the 2010s. You can read my review of Under the Influence for the New Statesman here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; More: the 10,000 Year Rise of the World Economy&nbsp; by Philip Coggan Financial Times |&nbsp; 14 February 2020 Adam Smith concluded the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations with an observation intended to shock his readers out of their complacency. So miraculous is the power of economic growth, he wrote, that “the accommodation of an European prince does not so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king”. What was the magic formula that had allowed Europe’s economies to furnish even their poorest citizens with such unprecedented material comfort? Smith made this the ur-question of economic history — and in his masterwork, he supplied the ur-answer. The secret sauce is trade, and the division of labour which it permits. That led to his central policy conclusion: a liberal economic order that gives free rein to trade is to be protected at all costs from the partisans of protectionism and monopoly. More, a lucid and wide-ranging new history of the global economy from Philip Coggan, is a book firmly in the Smithian tradition. Like Smith, Coggan — a senior Economist journalist and former FT columnist — is concerned that the sheer scale of what compound economic growth has achieved is not generally appreciated. Like Smith, he locates the roots of these tremendous improvements in the spread of markets and the growth of trade. And like Smith, Coggan’s ultimate goal is to defend the virtues of a liberal economic order in an age when those virtues are under siege. You can read my review of More for the Financial Times here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; Sabotage&nbsp;by Anna Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan New Statesman |&nbsp; 29 January 2020 Sam Mendes’s 1917 is the talk of Oscar season – but when I went to see it last week I was prepared to be disappointed. My fears had nothing to do with the film’s cast or crew. The trouble is that the film’s subject matter is hardly virgin territory.&nbsp; Make a film about the First World War, and you are pitting yourself against Renoir and Kubrick, to say nothing of Blunden, Sassoon, Junger, and Remarque – and that’s before you even get to the poets.&nbsp; It is a high bar for any new artistic treatment. I have to confess that I had a similar sense of trepidation when I began Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan’s new book Sabotage: The Business of Finance.&nbsp; As its title suggests, this is a book about what is wrong with finance and how to reform it.&nbsp; Moreover, much of the evidence it adduces to answer these questions consists of case studies from the global financial crisis of 2007-09. As Sabotage itself concedes early on, these are topics which by now been picked over in minute detail in a decade’s-worth of articles, books, plays and films. &nbsp;Here too the bar for yet another effort is set high.&nbsp; What new contribution, I wondered, can Sabotage possibly make to set itself apart? You can find out in my review of the book in the New Statesman. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; John Law&nbsp; by James Buchan Financial Times |&nbsp; 1 September 2018 Anyone who feels gloomy about the current state of the world’s advanced economies — with their public finances groaning and their policymaking paralysed by vested interests — should spare a thought for France in September 1715. That was the month in which Louis XIV, the Sun King of Versailles, died after 72 years on the throne and half a century of near-constant war. He left behind a necrotic economy, a treasury on the verge of bankruptcy, and a system of state finance that depended on a vast class of rentiers virulently opposed to any kind of entitlement reform. Philippe, Duc d’Orleans, France’s newly appointed regent, was at a loss for what to do. Into this desperate situation stepped one of history’s most extraordinary, versatile, and enigmatic characters, and the subject of James Buchan’s masterly new biography — a little-known Scots gambler, adventurer, and sometime economist by the name of John Law. I reviewed Buchan’s John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century in the Financial Times on September 1, 2018: you can read it here. I explain in my review that my one regret is that Buchan does not explore Law’s actual ideas in more detail.&nbsp; That is a pity, because in my view Law was a visionary theorist and policy-maker, many of whose ideas are even more relevant today than they were three hundred years ago. I therefore strongly recommend that anyone interested in Law reads not just Buchan’s biography, but also Antoin Murphy’s John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker – which remains the gold standard on Law’s theoretical and practical innovations. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; Unelected Power&nbsp;by Paul Tucker New Statesman |&nbsp; 13 June 2018 A few weeks ago, President Erdogan of Turkey announced on the campaign trail that if he is re-elected later this summer, his first act will be to take control of interest rates back from the Central Bank of Turkey. The currency markets were shocked: the Turkish lira promptly dropped by 10%. The reason is that President Erdogan’s bold proposal flies in the face of what has been for forty years the modern consensus on the best way to conduct monetary policy.&nbsp; Politicians, that consensus holds, will always be tempted to prioritise popularity at the ballot box over economic stability, resulting in boom-bust cycles ultimately detrimental to growth and employment.&nbsp; The setting of interest rates should therefore be delegated, it says, to a technocratic central bank, which will have the political independence to take the longer term view. President Erdogan, however, sees things differently. &nbsp;“When people fall into difficulties because of monetary policies, who are they going to hold accountable?” he asked: “They’ll hold the president accountable.” &nbsp;In a democracy, the President was arguing, it is not enough for those who make policy to be competent and effective.&nbsp; When their actions determine who gets what and why, they have to have legitimacy as well; and democratic legitimacy is the one thing that technocrats, almost by definition, lack. Who is right – &nbsp;the modern consensus, with its emphasis on the need for expertise and independence; or the President, who says accountability and legitimacy should take priority?&nbsp; The underlying issue is summed up in the title of this new book by Sir Paul Tucker – the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, and now a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School.&nbsp; It is why, when, and how elected governments should entrust their capabilities to Unelected Power. In my view, it is difficult to overstate the importance this question – and therefore how valuable and timely this book is. &nbsp;You can read my review of it in the New Statesman magazine here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; The Great Economists by Linda Yueh New Statesman |&nbsp; 19 March 2018 Is economics a science? &nbsp;It’s an old question – and in my view, not a terribly useful one.&nbsp;&nbsp;Yet there is of course a reason why it never stops being asked. Physicists have discovered the universal laws governing energy and motion, and as a result can tell us with scarcely credible precision how to land a man on the moon. &nbsp;Economists, by contrast, can’t even agree on why the last financial crisis happened, let alone what we should do to prevent the next one – and that’s despite the fact we wrote the rules of finance ourselves.&nbsp;&nbsp;Real sciences make progress.&nbsp;&nbsp;Economics, on the other hand, seems to go round and round in circles. Needless to say, this embarrassing situation irritates economists more than anyone else. &nbsp;As a result, over the past several decades, mainstream economics has attempted to assimilate itself ever more closely to the culture and methods of the natural sciences.&nbsp;&nbsp;These days, self-respecting economists express their theories as mathematical models, not in words.&nbsp;&nbsp;Advanced statistical techniques are deployed to test hypotheses and so resolve the answers to empirical questions.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;If possible, experiments are designed and conducted.&nbsp;&nbsp;A few of the most&nbsp;avant garde&nbsp;researchers have even gone so far as to rebrand their research groups as “labs”. Whether these developments represent a long-overdue reform of the methodology of economics, or just the symptoms of a chronic inferiority complex, they have certainly dealt a mortal blow to one formerly central area of the economics curriculum: the history of economic thought. &nbsp;If, after all, economics is a science, there is no more point in reading the economists of prior ages than there is in engaging with Aristotle on biology or mugging up the theory of phlogiston. The publication of Linda Yueh’s The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today is therefore a fascinating event for anyone interested in economics. &nbsp;For this is a book which, as it title suggests, openly champions the value of studying the leading economic thinkers of the past.&nbsp; You can read my review of it in the New Statesman here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; The Growth Delusion&nbsp; by David Pilling Financial Times |&nbsp; 10 January 2018 In the good old days before Brexit and the global financial crisis, politics was all so simple. The western liberal democracies had reached the “End of History”. So far as old conundrums such as ideology and identity were concerned, nobody really cared much any more. All that mattered now was to ramp up material prosperity. “It’s the economy, stupid”, as Bill Clinton apocryphally said. It all sounds rather naive now, of course. Two and a half decades on from President Clinton’s bons mots, the world’s developed economies are wealthier than ever — indeed, more than 70 per cent larger in real terms than they were in 1992. Yet far from having achieved a nirvana of political stability, they are racked by a social strife and ideological conflict unseen in many decades. Where did Clinton’s confident verdict go wrong? It is the Ur-question of our era, and the political convulsions of the past decade have ushered in a golden age of popular social and economic analysis intended to explain why an expanding economy is not by itself enough. The Growth Delusion, a new book by the FT’s Africa editor David Pilling, offers a new and intriguing entry-point to this momentous debate.&nbsp; You can read my review of it for the Financial Times here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington New Statesman |&nbsp; 11 October 2016 On April 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published a vast cache of information leaked from Mossack Fonseca, a little-known corporate law firm based in Panama City. The “Panama Papers” revealed that this firm had for many decades specialised in devising schemes to&nbsp;enable clients from all over the world to hold their financial assets, often anonymously, in jurisdictions outside their home countries. In doing so, they shone a rare light on the secretive industry that is the topic of Brooke Harrington’s valuable new book, Capital Without Borders: the lawyers, accountants, tax advisers and professional trustees who collectively constitute the world of wealth management. That world is, by definition, difficult to research. Previous studies have focused on the legal and constitutional anomalies represented by the so-called offshore jurisdictions where the corporate structures they build are incorporated: the British Virgin Islands, Mauritius, the Cayman Islands, and so on. What makes Harrington’s book unusual is that she chose instead to investigate the wealth management industry itself. There were no short cuts to doing so. Harrington went undercover as a trainee wealth manager for two years, living and breathing the profession. The result is an insight unlike any other into how wealth management works. You can read my review of Capital Without Borders for the New Statesman here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; Money Changes Everything by William N. Goetzmann New York Times |&nbsp; 24 June 2016 “The very rich are different from you and me,” Ernest Hemingway has F. Scott Fitzgerald write in the original version of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” “Yes,” comes the response, “they have more money.” This famous (and wholly fictional) exchange is memorable because it captures so succinctly one of the great fascinations of finance, how it is at one and the same time something so completely mysterious and so utterly banal. It also poses an important question: Does having more money than someone constitute a difference only in quantity, or in quality? Does the increase of financial wealth just make for more of the same — or does it change people in a more essential way? Hemingway was exploring these questions on the level of the individual. William N. Goetzmann, the Edwin J. Beinecke professor of finance and management at Yale, is shooting for bigger game in his new book, “Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible.” His goal is to explore the consequences of the invention and growth of finance for whole societies. As his title suggests, his conclusion is that they are firmly positive. Financially advanced societies, he argues, are very different from financially primitive ones — and not just in that they have more money. I reviewed Goetzmann’s fascinating book for The New York Times in its June 26, 2016 issue. &nbsp;You can read my review here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; The Only Game in Town by Mohamed El-Erian Financial Times |&nbsp; 22 January 2016 The US stock market has just endured its worst start to a year on record. The fear is that the US may be close to recession, with baleful consequences for the global economy – and still worse, that the world’s policy-makers are out of ammo with which to respond. What better moment could there be for a book subtitled “Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse”? And who better to write it than Mohamed El-Erian&nbsp;– the man who captured the essence of the present era of low growth, low inflation&nbsp;and low investment returns better than anyone else with his memorable concept of&nbsp;the “New Normal”? I reviewed Mohamed El-Erian’s new book The Only Game in Town in the Financial Times on January 22, 2016. &nbsp;You can read the review here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; Other People’s Money by John Kay &amp; Between Debt and the Devil by Adair Turner New Statesman |&nbsp; 27 November 2015 That is the question at the heart of two books recently published by two of Britain’s leading economists: John Kay’s Other People’s Money and Adair Turner’s Between Debt and the Devil. I reviewed both books in the November 27, 2015 issue of the New Statesman.&nbsp; You can read my review here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; The Silo Effect by Gillian Tett Financial Times |&nbsp; 29 August 2015 Specialisation improves efficiency – but it also leads to tunnel vision and blind spots. &nbsp;This paradox at the heart of modern life, and how to resolve it, are the topics of Gillian Tett’s new book The Silo Effect. I reviewed The Silo Effect in the August 29-30, 2015 edition of the Financial Times. &nbsp;You can read my review here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; Pax Technica by Philip Howard Financial Times |&nbsp; 20 May 2015 The subject of Philip Howard’s Pax Technica — the emerging “internet of things” — could not be more timely and important; and its central premise — that this new stage in the evolution of the web has political implications that will match or even outstrip its commercial ones — is both striking and convincing. I reviewed Pax Technica for the Financial Times on May 20, 2015. &nbsp;You can read my review here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; The Flat White Economy&nbsp;by Douglas McWilliams Financial Times |&nbsp; 19 May 2015 I reviewed Douglas McWilliams’s new book, The Flat White Economy, in the latest New Statesman.&nbsp; You can read my review here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; Mindful Work by David Gelles Financial Times |&nbsp; 22 January 2015 David Gelles’ Mindful Work is a fascinating new book about the growing adoption of mindfulness and meditation by Western businesses as a tool, ultimately, to boost the bottom line. My review of it for the Financial Times was published on January 22, 2015.&nbsp; You can read the review here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; The Shifts and the Shocks by Martin Wolf New Statesman | 30 October 2014 I reviewed Martin Wolf’s new book, The Shifts and the Shocks, in the latest New Statesman.&nbsp; You can read my review here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; Bending Adversity by David Pilling New Statesman | 6 February 2014 I reviewed David Pilling’s new book Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival in the February 6, 2014 issue of the New Statesman. You can read the review here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; Scarity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir &amp; Mass Flourishing by Edmund Phelps New Statesman | 5 September 2013 I reviewed Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s&nbsp; Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Measn So Much, and Edmund Phelps’s Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change&nbsp; in the February 6, 2014 issue of the New Statesman. You can read the review here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; Economics After the Crisis by Adair Turner New Statesman | 4 June 2012 I reviewed Adair Turner’s Economics after the Crisis: Objectives and Means in the June 4, 2012 issue of the New Statesman. You can read the review here. Book review&nbsp; |&nbsp; The End of Money by David Wolman The Observer | 25 March 2012 I reviewed The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers – and the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman for the Observer. You can read the review here. Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books &nbsp; &nbsp;Articles &nbsp; Media&nbsp; &nbsp;Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact Archive&nbsp; |&nbsp; Book reviews ... http://felixmartin.org/Contact Fri, 02 Jul 2021 11:39:15 +0000 Felix Martin 408196 Contact For speaking engagements, please contact: Karen O’Donnell at Chartwell Speakers For rights and publicity, please contact: Natasha Fairweather at RCW Literary Agency Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books&nbsp; &nbsp;Articles&nbsp; &nbsp;Media&nbsp; &nbsp;Speaking Contact For speaking engagements, please contact: Karen O’Donnell at Chartwell Speakers For rights and publicity, please contact: Natasha Fairweather... http://felixmartin.org/Speaking Fri, 02 Jul 2021 11:39:05 +0000 Felix Martin 408195 Speaking I regularly speak on a wide range of topics in economics and investment, as well as on the subject of my book, Money: the Unauthorised Biography. You see examples&nbsp;here. <img width="2453" height="1168" width_o="2453" height_o="1168" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/204c59982bf580d74353849bffd93f1d1fde27916b1c274980d45d34ecb778cc/FM-speaking-photo-Hay.jpg" data-mid="1410174" border="0" /> If you’d like to ask me to speak, please contact: Karen O’Donnell at Chartwell Speakers Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books&nbsp; &nbsp;Articles&nbsp; &nbsp;Media &nbsp; Contact Speaking I regularly speak on a wide range of topics in economics and investment, as well as on the subject of my book, Money: the Unauthorised Biography. You see... http://felixmartin.org/Media Fri, 02 Jul 2021 11:38:45 +0000 Felix Martin 408194 Media I am a regular contributor to radio programmes, podcasts, documentaries, and news reports. For an archive of my media contributions, click here. <img width="2557" height="1440" width_o="2557" height_o="1440" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/7c7dc650953e2f61df10ca52bfc71ced5a038da6e8b428b1c038c8eb73864018/NHK-Metaverse-Documentary-3.jpg" data-mid="1223685" border="0" /> Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books&nbsp; &nbsp;Articles &nbsp; Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact Media I am a regular contributor to radio programmes, podcasts, documentaries, and news reports. For an archive of my media contributions, click here. ... http://felixmartin.org/Articles Fri, 02 Jul 2021 11:22:37 +0000 Felix Martin 408193 Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books &nbsp; Media&nbsp; &nbsp;Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact Articles I have written articles, op-eds, and book reviews for many publications, including the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Wired, the Financial Times, The Observer, The Telegraph, Reuters; and&nbsp; the New Statesman.&nbsp; I currently write a column on economics, finance, and markets for Reuters Breakingviews. For an archive of my other articles, columns, and op-eds, click&nbsp;here.&nbsp; For an archive of my book reviews, click&nbsp;here. A couple of recent pieces are below. Gambling Man: the Wild Ride of Japan’s Masayoshi Son by Lionel BarberThe Financial Times |&nbsp; 16 October&nbsp;2024 At the very beginning of Gambling Man, his biography of Masayoshi “Masa” Son, the founder of Japanese investment firm SoftBank, Lionel Barber concedes that his subject is “probably the most powerful mogul of the twenty-first century who is not a household name”. The rest of the book proceeds to prove how absurd a paradox this is.Son is, after all, a biographer’s dream. His career is an almost surreal string of personal highs and lows. Zelig-like, he has been present at - and indeed often responsible for - almost every big turning point in global tech over the past four decades. This is a man, Barber, a former editor of the FT, reminds us, who has been “the single largest foreign investor in capitalist America and communist China; the biggest start-up funder in the world, and the boss of one of the top ten most indebted firms, continually threatening a financial implosion”. You can read my review of the book here. AI’s civil war will force investors to take sidesReuters Breakingviews&nbsp; |&nbsp; 7 February 2025 In their satirical history of the United Kingdom, “1066 And All That”, the authors W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman cast the English civil war of the 17th century as a conflict between the “Wrong but Romantic” Cavaliers and the “Right but Revolting” Roundheads. The aftermath of the release last month of Chinese startup DeepSeek’s R1 artificial intelligence model, which matches or outperforms existing offerings from U.S. technology titans at a fraction of the cost, has exposed a similar divide among the world’s leading innovators in the field of machine learning. On one side are those who strive for artificial general intelligence (AGI), the point where machines match or surpass human capabilities. Let’s call them AI Cavaliers. Facing them are AI Roundheads who are focused on the more mundane goal of solving specific problems as efficiently as possible. Deciding which side to back in this AI civil war will be a defining decision for investors in the world’s hottest technology. You can read why in my column&nbsp; here. Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About&nbsp; &nbsp;Books &nbsp; Media&nbsp; &nbsp;Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact Articles I have written articles, op-eds, and book reviews... http://felixmartin.org/Books Fri, 02 Jul 2021 11:01:42 +0000 Felix Martin 408191 Books Money: the Unauthorised Biography Vintage, 2013 Money: the Unauthorised Biography was published&nbsp; in 2013 in the UK by The Bodley Head, and in 2014 in the US by Alfred A. Knopf.&nbsp; The book argues that the conventional understanding of money is wrong; explains why this is a big problem because it presents a major obstacle to formulating the policies that can extricate us from the global debt crisis; and offers an alternative explanation of what money really is – with radical implications for economics, finance, and the future of capitalism.&nbsp; <img width="277" height="430" width_o="277" height_o="430" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/601ee0a649f97db11b7e095bd12a2456abe7b2a051811a0b826e7c83ac406f6f/MUB-UK-Vintage.jpg" data-mid="1103333" border="0" data-scale="100"/> It has been published in fifteen countries and ten languages, was a Financial Times Economics Book of the Year 2013, a finalist for both the 2013 Guardian First Book Award and the 2014 German Economic Book Prize, and was called “compulsively readable” by the New York Times. It must also (surely...) be the only book to have been both&nbsp;cited by the US Supreme Court and&nbsp;endorsed by the lead singer of Kiss. You can watch a short trailer for Money: the Unauthorised Biography here. &nbsp; Home&nbsp; &nbsp; About &nbsp; Articles&nbsp; &nbsp;Media&nbsp; &nbsp;Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact Books Money: the Unauthorised Biography Vintage, 2013 Money: the Unauthorised Biography was published&nbsp; in 2013 in the UK by The Bodley Head, and in... http://felixmartin.org/About Fri, 02 Jul 2021 09:38:03 +0000 Felix Martin 408190 About I am an economist, fund manager, and&nbsp; author. &nbsp; I was educated in the UK, Italy, and the US, where I was a Fulbright scholar; and have degrees in classics, international relations, and economics. Between 1998 and 2008, I worked at the World Bank, mostly on the reconstruction of the former Yugoslavia, and helped establish the European Stability Initiative think tank. &nbsp; Since 2008 I have worked in the fund management industry in London, first at Thames River Capital – now part of BMO Global Asset Management; then at Liontrust Asset Management; and most recently as one of the founding partners of 1167 Capital. <img width="575" height="806" width_o="575" height_o="806" src_o="https://cortex.persona.co/t/original/i/f12e4529ad291a18db9e17491fdd72ec7c26a6e9f57f69c3ef6fcfa63581cbbf/FM-web-paint-black.jpg" data-mid="1115929" border="0" /> Home &nbsp;&nbsp; Books&nbsp; &nbsp;Articles&nbsp; &nbsp;Media&nbsp; &nbsp;Speaking&nbsp; &nbsp;Contact About I am an economist, fund manager, and&nbsp; author. &nbsp; I was educated in the UK, Italy, and the US, where I was a Fulbright scholar; and have...