We Shall Fight in the Cheesemongers’

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

At first sight, Pax Economica does not look like a book that will throw off amusing stories to entertain your friends over rosé-fuelled lunches in Tuscany or the Dordogne. Even Starmerite gatherings under the olive tree may not want to hear much about the Marx–Manchester tradition of leftist free-trade enthusiasts. Indeed, their pro-single-market descendants (and […]

Crash & Earn

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Argentina’s history is like a rollercoaster ride. When you think that the economy has sunk to the absolute bottom, you find out that it can fall some more. And then, after a crisis and substantial cleansing, it rebounds and reaches new heights, only to fall once again. This pattern repeats itself decade after decade. I […]

Rise of the Bean-Counters

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

Such is the reputation of accounting among the general public – as tedious, pedantic, incomprehensible and, in a word, boring – that many people will run a mile when they hear that a new book about financial book-keeping and its role in economic and political history has been published. They will be making a big […]

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Gods of the Gaps

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

Michael Lewis is in a class of his own. Not in the sense that he is uniquely gifted (though Tom Wolfe says he’s ‘probably the best current writer in America’), but in the sense that the launch of another of his forays into the financial jungle is an event to compare with, in her day, […]

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A Tax on Both Your Houses

Posted on by Frank Brinkley

In the 19th century, tsarist censors banned John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty while letting through Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Mill’s message was so lucidly expressed that it posed an obvious and immediate threat to the regime; Marx’s prose was clotted and convoluted and his economics littered with leftovers from his youthful enthusiasm for Hegel. Thomas […]

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