We have a problem with data. Despite being awash in it, the signals that we are receiving from it are adding to the fog of uncertainty, rather than the clarity we all so desperately need. In the post-COVID-19 world, the value that can be gleaned
When Francis Bacon was laying out the foundations for experimental science 400 years ago, he listed out a series of confusions and mistakes people would most likely encounter. Curiously, the “marketplace” was the most troublesome for him, even though at that time the free market
The idea of capitalism was hijacked by Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s, when he narrated a drama in which the entrepreneur entered as a hard-nosed antihero and a driver of progress and innovation. He painted the entrepreneur, in the words of the economist Arthur Smithies,
The “greater fool” is actually an economic term. Simply put, it’s a patsy. For someone to profit, we need a greater fool, someone who will buy long and sell short. Most people spend their entire life trying not to be the greater fool, someone who
The financial crisis of 1914 in London around the outbreak of the First World War was a sensational event for those who lived through it … and an extraordinary episode by any standard. Yet today, it is virtually unknown to historians, economists and everyone else.
Deflation is everywhere. It is all around us. It is there when we go to work, when we pay our taxes and when we turn on our television. It is the world that has been pulled over our eyes, to prevent us from understanding that
During the 6th century, the people of Athens fell into troubled times. First, on account of poor harvest and then from pestilence, as farmers were unable to make interest payments on their debts. As a consequence, they were sold as serfs into slavery. As the
Anyone who reads and writes about economics must sometimes wonder what fiction is, where its boundaries are, and if they exist at all. The question implies certain distinctions, as between fiction and fact, or more cautiously, between fiction and non-fiction. These distinctions exist, and are
Our experience of financial crises and economic malaise is in a sense exhaustive. But our sense of how they started is confined to just two models — the traditional boom-bust, which is characterised by speculation and euphoria, and the other one is the pandemic-induced coma.
For economies like the UAE, which rely on the “vents of surplus” from other countries, there is no escaping the fact that its fate remains fundamentally intertwined to that of developed and developing economies. There is no shame in a recession. As country after country
