Ominous noises. Brexit again.

“Just left Frankfurt. Great meetings, great weather, really enjoyed it. Good, because I’ll be spending a lot more time there. #Brexit.” Thus tweeted Lloyd Blankfein, Chief Executive of Goldman Sachs, on 19th October. It was the first time a major American financial services firm had signalled a shift of its European operations away from London …

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Trump supporters and authoritarianism

“Political pollsters have missed this key component of Trump’s support because they simply don’t include questions about authoritarianism in their polls. In addition to the typical battery of demographic, horse race, thermometer-scale and policy questions, my poll asked a set of four simple survey questions that political scientists have employed since 1992 to measure inclination …

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The crippling cost of zero interest rates

They used to say there are but three ways to ruin the class of petit-bourgeois savers who form the backbone of all successful democracies: a banking collapse (as in the 1929 crash); hyperinflation (as in banana republics); or straightforward state expropriation (as in oppressive taxation). Now we’ve invented a fourth. The introduction of zero to …

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