Lord Griffiths: Can the Bank of England Stop the Drift of Inflation into Stagflation?

UK inflation is suddenly back with a vengeance. In an interview with the Financial Times, Huw Pill, the chief economist at the Bank of England (and my former colleague at Goldman Sachs) warns that the official rate of inflation may rise above five per cent early next year. This means that the (...)

Environmentalism, Degrowth, and the Moral Case for Economic Growth

By John Kroencke

Those following the news in the U.S. and U.K. have strained to find much of intellectual interest in contemporary policy debates. Sure, there are ever-widening cultural battles and an array of topics on which one can admire the slogan-jousting of a few hired hands, but there is a seemingly small (...)

Andrei Rogobete: What Makes Society Ethical?

Some would say that with the National Insurance hike of 1.25%, Boris Johnson seems to have all but erased the (already thin-wearing) conservative ideology found within the Conservative party. However, there are some broader debates we should be having that do not cross party lines. Let’s give Boris the benefit (...)

Mutually Beneficial Solutions to the Housing Crisis

By John Kroencke

Housing reform efforts in both Britain and the United States have tended to get caught in the quagmire of fractious politics. For years, figures on the left have called for below market rate or social housing. Those in the free-market camp have called for easier private market development rights. Renters (...)

Lord Griffiths: A New Age of Inflation?

The success of major advanced countries in dealing with Covid over the last twelve months has been remarkable. Scientists first discovered the vaccines. Then business accelerated their manufacture on an enormous scale. And as the vaccinations have been rolled out, the economic recovery has been dramatic.  As new variants appear we (...)

Steve Morris: Lost gurus of the 80s – Jan Carlzon (Part 1: Moments of Truth)

  Jan Carlzon’s book Moments of Truth comes from the depths of the 1980s. It is both prophetic and deeply inspiring and as fresh and relevant now as it was when he wrote it. Carlzon was the young and dynamic president and CEO of Scandinavian Airline Services (SAS). He faced (...)

Philip Booth: Subsidiarity Post-Covid

  “[i]t is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.” (Quadragesimo anno, 79).   In the current crisis, there is much talk of “policy reset”. Some of (...)

Steve Morris: The Homespun Wisdom of Robert K Greenleaf

Steve Morris continues his series on lost management gurus It is 1969 and campuses in the US are alive with revolt and turmoil. The anti-Vietnam protests are getting serious and America looks like it might fracture. It was time for a little-known educator, born in 1904 in Terre Haute, Indiana (...)

Andrei Rogobete: A High Savings Ratio is Nothing to Cheer About

On the surface, one of the few bright spots of the second quarter of this year was a sharp rise in the UK’s savings ratio. But though an increase of 29% sounds like good news, in reality it’s quite the opposite. More than anything, the surge in saving signals an (...)

Steve Morris: The lost wisdom of John Harvey-Jones

Steve Morris continues his series on lost management gurus There is something infinitely sad that the great classic books of the late John Harvey-Jones are now available for one penny on Amazon. Indeed, every book Harvey-Jones ever wrote is out of print. Harvey Jones has been written out of history (...)

Lord Griffiths: Will Covid-19 kickstart inflation?

Last August, in The Spectre of Inflation, I argued that the remarkable stability of prices in the past 25 years was due to central banks having operational independence and conducting monetary policy with a fixed inflation target of two per cent. While respondents and others put forward a variety of views (...)