The Curious Engineer

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mainly macro

mainlymacro.blogspot.com

Comment on macroeconomic issues

Society / politics / economy

’15’20’25
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1,727 from 16 Dec 2011 to 27 Oct 2026
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weekly (50 in the last year)
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October 2026

  1. The Big Picture for the forthcoming UK Budget that the media largely ignores
  2. The Decline of Knowledge Based Policy and the Economics Nobel
  3. Interest rates and Budget Deficits
  4. Misconceptions following Burnham’s speech

September 2026

  1. Populist tendencies on the UK left, and the puzzle that never was
  2. How should the government meet its Golden Rule when debt interest increases?
  3. Racism and xenophobia are not 'legitimate concerns'.
  4. Understanding long term interest rates movements over the austerity period and today
  5. Is the fall of Starmer a warning for the Democratic Party?

August 2026

  1. Media regulation is partly about protecting individuals and groups from powerful organisations and the wealthy, but it is also about protecting democracy.
  2. Signs of recovery in comparative UK economic growth
  3. Unpicking the legacy of neoliberalism
  4. Long term fiscal projections are a good antidote to politicians talking about tax cuts

July 2026

  1. The relationship between capital, plutocracy and populism
  2. The political barriers to radical tax reform
  3. How Right Wing Populism came easily to the Conservative Party
  4. The UK’s falling debt to GDP fiscal rule is a rule to suppress public investment

June 2026

  1. Sowing the Seeds of UK Revival
  2. Why governments should not be in hock to the bond market
  3. The Consequences of Tolerating the Far Right
  4. Trends in UK Inequality and Poverty
  5. Immigration numbers and the media

May 2026

  1. New ideas from Labour on economic policy
  2. Why Labour's current disarray is ultimately the consequence of Osborne’s austerity
  3. Why has Westminster politics become so dumb?
  4. UK decline and stylised empirical facts

April 2026

  1. Capital and Right Wing Populism
  2. Should the government compensate consumers for cost of living shocks?
  3. Orbán, Trump and the International Right Wing Populist Movement
  4. Taxation as Insurance, Welfare and Entitlements

March 2026

  1. The damage that right wing populists do
  2. Both Reform and Conservatives are now officially Islamophobic
  3. Public Attitudes to taxes and spending, and VAT zero rating
  4. Idiot Wind
  5. Why Gorton and Denton is still a good result for Reform

February 2026

  1. Budgets are about much more than fiscal sustainability
  2. How Labour makes fighting right wing populism harder
  3. Fiscal watchdogs, pluralist democracy, technocracy and evidence based policy
  4. The Conservatives need to embrace the Centre Right

January 2026

  1. How Liberal Democratic Countries will cooperate without the US
  2. Greenland
  3. A Post Neoliberal Consensus
  4. What kind of crisis would a bursting AI bubble become?

December 2025

  1. Understanding the rise of the populist far right
  2. Labour, a supply side explanation for the rise of populism, and the growing acceptability of xenophobic discourse in the UK
  3. The Budget suggests the Chancellor is thinking too much about short term management and too little about long term legacy

November 2025

  1. Expertise, Government, the Media and Covid
  2. Blue Labour’s Electoral Fallacies
  3. Labour’s Brexit stance is as untenable as their tax pledge
  4. UK Productivity and the Budget

October 2025

  1. How the reaction to a football ban showed how our politicians and media have become trapped in right wing Islamophobic narratives and detached from the majority of voters
  2. What the call for fiscal headroom reveals
  3. Populism and Economic Prosperity
  4. The uphill struggle to stop Reform

September 2025

  1. Misunderstandings on the left (and elsewhere) about the OBR, independence and the bond market
  2. Farage and the BBC
  3. Parallels between what to do about Trump and what to do about Farage
  4. Key myths on asylum, immigration and how to take on the far right
  5. The real fiscal concern should be a populist government

August 2025

  1. Reform and the UK press
  2. When did relative UK decline begin? Productivity and the Global Financial Crisis
  3. Fascism, Rivers of Blood, and today’s political and media elite
  4. UK Growth, Productivity and Investment.

July 2025

  1. Delusions on the Left and Labour Right
  2. Thoughts on the unpopularity of different approaches to tax rises
  3. Ancestry and Immigration in the US and UK
  4. Everyone knows Labour has made mistakes. What is more worrying is why those mistakes were made.
  5. Other countries' wars and the media

June 2025

  1. A minimum tax on billionaires
  2. Is the decline of democracy inevitable?
  3. Why following the path of the last Labour government will not work this time
  4. The IMF on the UK’s fiscal rules

May 2025

  1. Is the centre right doomed?
  2. Reeves is not following in Osborne’s footsteps
  3. Starmer’s Disgraceful and Damaging Remarks
  4. The mistakes that have led the Conservatives towards annihilation, and Labour copying them

April 2025

  1. What Labour is getting wrong in fighting right wing populism
  2. Is two-party politics really dead in the UK?
  3. The new silent majority
  4. Why populists can do so much harm
  5. Last week’s spending cuts were not the fault of the OBR or a medium term golden fiscal rule

March 2025

  1. Why can’t we do fiscal policy in a grown up way?
  2. Labour’s strategic error on tax
  3. Falling confidence in vaccination illustrates how the media’s obsession with balance and impartiality, and its aversion to regulation, can kill.
  4. The moves to weaken Germany’s debt brake are welcome, but ultimately higher defense spending should be matched by higher taxes. Public spending cuts will promote right wing populists.
  5. Current UK stagnation may have many causes, but one we know about is the UK media. Plus why the UK definition of a recession is no longer fit for purpose.

February 2025

  1. A New World Order
  2. Is Trump a Populist or a Fascist?
  3. Quantifying the continuing UK public spending squeeze
  4. A government of small change

January 2025

  1. Labour and Growth
  2. Mediamacro melodrama
  3. The battle of our age
  4. Vibes for the economy and other things

December 2024

  1. After neoliberalism: dynamics of transformation
  2. The politics of stupid
  3. Investment in politics, like economics, involves risk and present sacrifice

November 2024

  1. Should governments protect citizens from external shocks to living standards?
  2. Freedom of Speech and Media Regulation
  3. How could they vote for him?
  4. The Markets, the Budget, the Media and electing a Fascist

October 2024

  1. A budget that points the way but doesn’t get us very far
  2. October Budget 7: Soaking the rich?
  3. October Budget 6: Thanks to Truss, bond market scare stories are back
  4. Why are the Conservatives ignoring the median voter?
  5. October Budget 5. The UK’s Fiscal rules: one good and one bad

September 2024

  1. Why improving health is an excellent investment in the economy
  2. October Budget 4 - Good and bad reasons to have fiscal rules, and why bad fiscal rules are worse than having no fiscal rules
  3. October Budget 3: In presenting a macroeconomic fiscal stance, Rachel Reeves and Labour need to talk about improving public services rather than book balancing
  4. October Budget 2: How much do UK taxes need to rise to end public spending austerity?

August 2024

  1. Transforming the politics of immigration
  2. October Budget 1: can economic growth end austerity?
  3. Racist riots and the Conservative party
  4. If Labour is serious about defeating right wing populism, it needs to reform large parts of the media

July 2024

  1. Was yesterday’s announcement austerity redux?
  2. More power to the OBR?
  3. Two myths about the future of the Conservative party
  4. What the Conservative rout tells us about the popularity of a right wing populist government
  5. Why tactical voting in this election could change the nature of the UK’s political debate

June 2024

  1. UK Election Special: The Conservatives could lose almost every seat to efficient tactical voting
  2. Why UK taxes should be higher
  3. Why is this election a disaster for the Conservatives?
  4. The macroeconomic cost of Conservative government
  5. Should voting in this election be about punishing the Conservatives, signalling to a future Labour government or something else?

May 2024

  1. Inside a Macroeconomic Policy Blunder
  2. Why Quantitative Easing is qualitatively important but quantitatively not so important
  3. The political right is in an illiberal trap of its own making, which offers their opponents opportunities
  4. When are large and persistent increases in debt to GDP justified?

April 2024

  1. High on their own supply
  2. The Bernanke Review of Bank of England Forecasting
  3. Could governments finance deficits by creating money?
  4. The Anatomy and Reasons for UK relative Economic and Political decline over the last decade and a half
  5. Why Quantitative Easing is currently so costly

March 2024

  1. Why raising taxes substantially is critical for the next Labour government to be sure of achieving its missions
  2. Detoxifying government debt, part 4. Labour’s inheritance
  3. On maxing out credit cards and magic money trees
  4. How 14 years have shown the impossibility of shrinking the UK state
  5. Rishi Sunak doesn’t want to talk about Islamophobia because he wants to use it

February 2024

  1. Detoxifying government debt, part 3. The Truss crisis has no relevance for Labour borrowing to invest
  2. Detoxifying government debt, part 2. Market myths
  3. Detoxifying government debt, part 1. Debt is also an asset
  4. One Rule to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them

January 2024

  1. The evolution of the UK Conservative party since 1979
  2. 2024 will be the year UK fiscal policy became a sad joke
  3. Why the centre-right has helped cause the drift to the far right in Western democracies
  4. If the next government isn’t diverting resources to investment then it will be giving up on our future
  5. The case for increasing government debt to green the economy is greater than for increasing debt during the pandemic

December 2023

  1. How a Labour government could be the tipping point for public discussion about immigration
  2. Lessons (so far) from the inflation bubble of 2021-3
  3. Unofficial lockdowns, and Sunak’s deadly incompetence during the pandemic

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