Economic Perspectives 112 – February 2022 – Emile Woolf                                                        ——————————————– Part 1 – Idiocy repeated   Any catalogue of economic legends would of course include the 2008 visit of Queen Elizabeth to the London School of Economics, when the country was experiencing an unprecedented housing market bubble based on the irrational belief […]

EMILE WOOLF ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES – 109 [November 2021] Veteran observers of economic folly have the advantage of experience. They are already familiar with the failed policies being enacted, yet again, by unprincipled politicians whose sole motivation is re-election. In the meanwhile these pillars of ineptitude, incapable of linking cause and effect, remain blind to the […]

WHEN SUPPLIERS PREFER THEIR GOODS TO OUR POUNDS [ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES 106 – OCTOBER 2021]   Following his interview with Vladimir Lenin on the subject of inflation in 1919, John Maynard Keynes quoted the Russian as having said “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch its currency”, and Keynes included Lenin’s comment […]

ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES – 103 The great debate now obsessing Treasury bosses and central bankers is whether all those trillions they continue to print so obsessively are at last producing a perceptible bout of hyperinflation. Before trying to make sense of that question let’s revisit some basics.    1 – What is inflation? Although “inflation” usually […]

ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES 92 – DECEMBER 2020 SOME UNSEASONAL REFLECTIONS ON MONEY Several comments and questions on my last essay deserve a thoughtful response, which is the theme of today’s essay. You may recall its references to today’s dependency culture – the “expectation syndrome” that fuels the size and cost of welfare programmes as the state’s […]

ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES – 87   SEPTEMBER 2020 The tenacity with which certain economic fallacies persist is truly remarkable. Take the notion that the euro currency is too strong for certain countries, notably Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy, causing their exports to be too expensive for foreign buyers; and being members of the eurozone they are […]

ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES – 75 PARTS 1 & 2 PART 1 – “SAVINGS: more important than the unstable money that measures it” I am typing this in the SAA Business Lounge of Durban airport, awaiting a call to board a flight to Johannesburg, where we are due to take the last flight to London before all […]

EMILE WOOLF – ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES 66 We are well into the protest season. The long run-up to the election period has been characterised by one protest after another – no-deal Brexit, climate change, arms sales, Tommy Robinson, police brutality, capitalism, Trump’s visit, fracking, Catalan, Hong Kong and Eritrean sympathisers, and so on … and on. […]

By Emile Woolf [ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES – 55] A couple of months back, in the context of blaming the government’s inflexibility for its failure to achieve a deal with the EU over Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn railed against the Tory Party, declaring that it “actually wants to turn this country into a deregulated, low-tax society that will […]

GOING POSTAL – 15 OCTOBER 2018 DEBUNKING ECONOMIC MYTHOLOGY – PART 2   <EP4> THE INFLATION CONUNDRUM Typically, the general public confuses any economic phenomenon with its manifestation. Both are thought of as the same thing. For example, the phenomenon “inflation” is assumed to mean the same thing as its manifestation, which is rising prices. The […]