It may only be Thursday, but with a four-day weekend starting tomorrow, it is appropriate that we send our weekly TFiF publication today: Thank Fathom it's a Four-day weekend (TFiFdw). The US military strike on a Syrian airbase may have dominated the headlines this week, but economists are still wondering just how Donald Trump will narrow the US trade deficit. Donald Trump's meeting with Xi Jinping passed smoothly. China is not a currency manipulator. There has also been a softer
"Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time..." Winston Churchill, 1947 Fathom has its annual office awayday today - lots of brainstorms, idea showers, blue-sky thinking and so on, and that's just over cocktails in the evening. But there is one over-arching issue: what about the food? Our options were constrained: we all had to eat the same meal, except if we wanted vegetarian food. Then, excluding
It will have escaped the attention of very few people active in the financial markets that long-term real rates of interest are low. Very low, in fact. Anyone buying a ten-year index-linked gilt today, and holding it to maturity, is guaranteed a real-terms loss of some 2.0%. That doesn't seem right, does it? What should determine a country's long-run real rate of interest? Economists have a bit of a long-winded answer, and it runs something like this. Ultimately, a country's
38915.9. To this day, that remains the Nikkei 225's all-time high, reached on 29 December 1989. Since that time Japan has suffered the best part of three lost decades, with little or no growth, and little or no inflation. Japan's woes were triggered by the bursting of its asset price bubble, which saw a collapse in both equity and land prices. Inevitably, non-performing loans (NPLs) rose sharply through the early 1990s. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
It was International Women's Day (IWD) this week - that time of the year when the world dedicates a full twenty four hours to celebrate the achievements of half its population. In the economic press, IWD has become an annual exploration of wage inequality between men and women. According to the latest research, the UK's gender pay gap is 18% - a very high number indeed. But perhaps the biggest source of income inequality between men and women around the
Wind the clock back to 2012. The single currency bloc was hit by what economists like to call an 'asymmetric shock', in the form of a good old-fashioned banking crisis. Countries with astronomically large banking systems compared to the size of their economies, including Ireland, Iceland and Cyprus, were hit particularly hard, along with those such as Greece, whose public finances were already in a state of disarray. In Cyprus, the situation was particularly acute. Cypriot banks failed en masseand
Thanks to the credibility of the Bank of England, consumer expectations do not jump around in the wake of shocks. The board at Leicester City FC should take note. One of the key questions for the UK outlook is: how far will the rise in inflation that is attributable to the weaker exchange rate become embedded in inflation expectations, influencing wage growth and potentially requiring tighter monetary policy? In our global model, UK inflation follows a short-run, expectations-augmented Phillips curve,
In spite of Fathom's previous note, interest in virtual currencies, of which Bitcoin remains the most prominent, is unabated. It's almost as though people aren't listening to us! But no, that cannot be. So what is going on - how to explain the continued demand for Bitcoin and the high value that it still commands? Bitcoin transactions are cheap, secure and opaque - difficult to monitor or trace. That makes it attractive to those who would prefer to keep the
It had to happen someday. After managing to keep its head down for a good few months, Greece is back in the spotlight. By last night's close the spread between Greek two-year yields and those of Germany had risen by more than 250 basis points since the beginning of the year. The trigger was the publication of the IMF's latest Article IV consultation with the indebted European nation, in which the world's lender of last resort argued that the burden
Since April last year, second homes and buy-to-let (BTL) properties have attracted an additional Stamp Duty and Land Tax (SDLT) levy of 3%, more than doubling the average effective rate previously charged. The intention of George Osborne, the then Chancellor, was to take some of the pressure out of the rapidly-growing BTL sector. Has the policy worked? In some respects, yes - data published this week show that the surcharge raised more than £1 billion for the public purse through