Category Archives: Europe

Philip Pilkington: Thinking Makes It So – The IMF Bailout of the UK in 1976 and the Rise of Monetarism

Monetarism began it’s rise to world prominence in the ever-conservative Bundesbank in 1974. But it would be the government of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, elected in 1979, that would truly launch monetarism in central banking. After Thatcher’s monetarist experiment undertaken between 1979 and 1984 every economics student would be taught to recite the various monetary aggregates by heart for at least a decade or two.

This is what accounts for the monetarist bent we see in the economists of the last generation. Basically any economist trained between roughly 1980 and 1995 would be heavily exposed to monetarist dogma. And only those that read alternative accounts of money creation — namely, the theory of endogenous money — would be fully immunised. This explains, for example, why certain economists that champion Keynesian policies — like Paul Krugman — actually speak in monetarist tones.

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Russia Eyes Crimea’s Oil and Gas Reserves

Dave here. In case you were thinking that the Great Game was obsolete or something. Needless to say the referendum passed, this was written slightly before the release of the results. By Nick Cunningham, a Washington DC-based writer on energy and environmental issues. You can follow him on twitter at @nickcunningham1. Cross-posted at Oil Price. […]

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Banker Farce: Spanish Bank CEO Launches Moral Crusade Against Political Corruption

“We have to fight corruption in order to build a new model of more sustainable and fairer growth.”

These laudable words came from the least likely of mouths – that of Francisco González, CEO of Spanish banking giant Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA). González was speaking at the bank’s annual shareholder meeting, held last week in Bilbao.

BBVA is Spain’s second biggest bank with operations in more than 30 countries including the U.S., China, Argentina, Columbia and Mexico. It has about 107,000 employees, 47 million customers worldwide, a million shareholders and now, it seems, a moralizing CEO.

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