On Global Markets

Until relatively recently, political risk – the notion that an election’s result might have a meaningful impact on asset market returns – was not really something those investing in American markets were especially concerned with. Few investors really believed that, say, the outcome of 1996’s Clinton-Dole race would have a lasting impact on the value […] 

A rather unpleasant theme of recent columns has been the Clark Center’s various Expert Panels not exactly being overjoyed with much of the policy prospectuses emerging from the ongoing American presidential campaign. This was both predictable and, indeed, predicted by the first On Global Markets column back in February. Working in a subject close to […] 

Last week the Nobel Prize for Economics (or, for the truly pedantic the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel) was awarded to Daron Acemoglu, (a member of the Clark Center US Experts Panel) Simon Johnson, and James Robinson for work on the most important topic on economics – why are some […] 

Florida has had the misfortune to be hit by two hurricanes just weeks apart. Alongside the tragic death toll, comes billions of dollars’ worth of economic damage. Hurricanes, and other extreme weather events, are increasingly economic events too. According to insurance modelers, Hurricane Milton is likely to result in claims worth around $36B whilst the […] 

The last month has seen much in the way of, often justified, gloomy introspection from European policymakers. Isabel Schnabel, a member of the European Central Bank’s policy-setting executive board made a useful speech on the 2nd of October rather tellingly entitled “Escaping Stagnation”. The raw facts speak for themselves, since the pandemic, the European economy […] 

Setting economic policy is hard. There are all sorts of reasons for this. For a start, the exact economic impact of any particular policy lever, interest rate change, law, or tax tweak is rarely entirely clear. Well-credentialed and good-meaning experts can, and do, disagree on the likely impacts. The responses to the Clark Center’s polls […] 

Federal Reserve meetings are rarely, outside of an immediate crisis, especially tense for market participants. Whilst On Global Markets has noted – more than once – that the market implied path of policy rates is rarely a useful guide to actual police outcomes over the medium to longer term, investors usually have a good handle […] 

Go back two or three decades and private credit was a small and rather niche segment of the financial ecosystem. If firms wanted to raise debt finance they generally either borrowed from a bank (either from a single institution or from a collection of entities via a syndicated loan) or raised the money on public […] 

Economics found itself back in the headlines in the United Kingdom this week. This time around though the issue was – thankfully – not declining standards, a slide in the value of sterling, or a near-crisis in government debt markets, all things with which British newspaper readers have become familiar with over the past two […] 

It is highly unlikely that when the Founding Fathers gathered to design the new US constitution they were thinking about the needs of future economists. Regardless of this, the institutional structure they adopted for the new United States has proved to be a boon for empirically focused social scientists. The quirk of US Federalism which […]