The use of cash as a medium of exchange is in long-term decline in most countries. Consumers have increasingly switched to electronic payments and online shopping, trends that have only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic — leading some to suggest that the virus may prove the final nail in the coffin for notes and coins. Sweden is often highlighted as a harbinger of the future, where even most banks no longer have cash and beggars accept electronic donations![1] Interestingly, however,

In this column last week my colleague Kevin wrote a strong argument in defence of doing nothing in certain situations. In that blog, he referenced a colleague who had told him, in jest, that his default position on many policy issues was dovish and to do nothing: for example, on climate change, Russia/Ukraine, and setting interest rates. That colleague, I admit, was me. In response, I’d like to make the case for doing something. Unfortunately for Kevin, he is currently

Discussing Russia-Ukraine with a colleague, they remarked that my usual policy prescriptions were biased towards dovishness and favoured the status quo: “Climate change? Do nothing. Fed interest rates? Do nothing. Russia-Ukraine? Do nothing,” This comment was made in jest (and is not accurate!), but there was a nugget of truth in there. One that I’m willing to defend. Of course, a world where nobody did anything wouldn’t work. Doing something is rightly the default position for almost everything. However, sometimes

In a rare display of bipartisan unity, the US President and members of Congress from both parties appeared yesterday in Washington DC (1.30pm EDT) to address what they referred to as “a critical personal problem that has evolved into a corporate epidemic with adverse financial market implications: narcissism”. Speakers referred to “The impact of the CEO’s personal narcissism on non-GAAP earnings", a research paper by four professors of accounting. The paper focuses on the use being made by CEOs of

When you are reading this, I’ll be holding my first child in my arms. Content. Relieved. And probably quite sleep-deprived, finding it hard to credit how James, my partner in crime, seems able to doze through our baby girl’s piercing cries in the night. (And yet a phone notification of a Leeds goal — albeit a rare occurrence — would no doubt elicit an instant reaction.) However I’m writing this back in February. It’s the early hours of the morning

I’ve just returned from our quarterly trip to Washington DC, and find I keep reflecting on a lunch I enjoyed on Wednesday. Six of us were sat round a table, perusing the menu and shooting the breeze in the usual way, different topics of conversations eddying between us without a real theme. We discussed crows (whether birds estimated to be three times the size of normal crows could really be crows); children (what ages were the easiest or most difficult

This was a question I found myself asking recently when my car battery died for the second time in a fortnight. It was nine in the evening, and with a long day of work behind me I was desperate to get to the supermarket to buy some food — it’s not hard to imagine my mood! Instead, I had a rummage in my freezer and managed to find something worth eating. I stuck it in the oven and sat down

I imagine most of us can think of a time when we delayed looking at our bank account, fearing what the sequence of digits might read compared to our last check. Maybe we have woken up feeling groggy, with a few gaps in our memory and the burgeoning effects of a night out. Or maybe we’ve enjoyed a day in town, paying cash for a haircut, tapping the debit card here and there in the shops and beeping the smartphone

Science fiction is not a genre that has ever done much for me. Space travel, however, regularly conjures similar enjoyable feelings of escapism to the psychedelic carpet ride of some Bowie songs. One of those waves of emotion was triggered during the past Christmas holidays as I was lying on a sofa, half comatose after washing down yet another food marathon with plenty of my mother’s home-brewed ‘Nocino’ liquor. While heroically trying to both stay awake and flip channels on

“It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” This pithy remark has been attributed variously to American baseball player Yogi Berra, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, and even Mark Twain. Regardless of origin, it can be readily applied to the science – or, as I shall argue, the art – of economic forecasting. When attempting to predict future values of any economic time series it is worth giving at least some thought to its order of integration. Over some