A notebook of useful things
Paul Krugman On The Euro Crisis – Business Insider.
A fascinating interview with 2008 Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, in which he describes the last two possible solutions to the Euro crisis. Both are impossible.
He basically sees two possible outcomes, both of which are “impossible.” Continue reading
Défense : les objectifs d’Hollande | Atlantico.
These last twenty years have seen a spate of defence white papers and policy announcements by various western nations. They have failed.
A white paper on defence has one purpose: to define a future strategic posture. All of the armed forces reorganisations announced since 1990, particularly those of France and the UK, have had to be revised, often after a couple of years.
If the new structures do not meet the new requirements, then the whole exercise is a (very costly) failure. Barring the United States in its latest Defence Strategic Guidance, no western nation has had the political courage and intellectual honesty to define the new threats. So they tinker with budgets and sketch out strategies to fight yesterday’s wars.
The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a fifth moon circling the dwarf planet Pluto.
The new moon (P5 in the picture), visible as a speck of light in Hubble images, is estimated to be irregular in shape and between 10km and 25km across.
We need a new name for Pluto’s new companion. After Charon, Nix and Hydra, the fourth moon is sitll nameless. And now comes the fifth. I propose Orpheus and Eurydice. Didn’t Orpheus visit the underworld to rescue his Eurydice?
As an alternative, we could try Continue reading
9July 2012, hours before a summit of eurozone finance ministers: comes the terrible headline: Spanish borrowing costs rise ahead of euro summit
Great. Should we worry or what? In June, Moody’s had cut Spain’s credit ratings to Baa3, just one notch above junk.
The world cannot wait. You tell ’em.
Why is it important for a country to protect its credit ratings?
In theory, credit ratings should be directly linked to interest rates on public debt. Continue reading
Not quite the Deutscher Bauernkrieg. This one’s coming from 172 economists, led by Hans-Werner Sinn who published an open letter demolishing Angela Merkel’s economic policies in favour of a European banking union. The letter was published two days ago in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Is this an Economists’ Revolt, after the Manifesto for Economic Sense?
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Richard Layard has become (once again) something of a household name after the publication of the Manifesto for Economic Sense, which he wrote with Paul Krugman.
Baron Layard (he is a Labour peer) rose to prominence after having lobbied the Blair government to include happiness economics in its policies. The results have been mixed. But that is to be expected. The real world has a nasty habit of derailing the best-laid plans.
On the substance though, Layard is right.
Paul Krugman and Richard Layard have just published a Manifesto for Economic Sense which attempts to lay out the real causes of the current economic crisis, and spell out a solution.
Make of it what you will. The professional reputation of the two authors is beyond reproach.
But perhaps they err in their innate belief in limitless growth.
Higgs boson-like particle discovery claimed at LHC
Thus spake the headlines. To be precise, it was a five-sigma detection. Of course cynics will say that we’d been using the Higgs boson in our calculations for half a century. Given enough energy, we were bound to observe it. And the Large Hadron Collider was built exactly for that purpose.
Expect torrents of commentary about “the god particle” over the next few weeks.
There’s a lesson for us here. If physics allows it, and if you throw enough money at the problem, it’s a piece of cake. The LHC is a very expensive bit of kit. So in the end it all boils down to money.
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