The international mainstream media is fawning over Mario Draghi, hailed as the saviour not only of Italy but of Europe as whole. In this article I explain why the facts don’t warrant such eulogising. Quite the contrary, in fact.
The international mainstream media is fawning over Mario Draghi, hailed as the saviour not only of Italy but of Europe as whole. In this article I explain why the facts don’t warrant such eulogising. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Paschal Donohoe, the Irish finance minister and president of the Eurogroup, has written a preposterous article in the Financial Times claiming that the budgetary response of the EU and US to the pandemic has been more or less similar. In this article I debunk such claims, showing that the fiscal responses of the EU and US are not even remotely comparable. The truth is that throughout the pandemic the UE/euro area has proven once again to be utterly dysfunctional, in macroeconomic as well as in organisational terms (as testified by the vaccine mess).
In his recent budget speech, British finance minister Rishi Sunak continued to spread dangerous fiscal myths about the alleged ‘strains’ faced by the UK’s public finances and the government’s need to ‘balance its books’.
In this article I explain why such claims are completely unfounded. As a currency-issuing government, the UK government can, and indeed does, simply create the money it needs out of thin air (effectively self-financing itself). Hence, it can always make good on any promise to repay bondholders, without the need to raise taxes (or cut back spending, for that matter) to ‘pay back’ the public debt, as Sunak implies.
Don’t be fooled by the EU’s sham ‘recovery fund’. It offers a pittance to struggling member states, but will allow Brussels to assume yet more control over their economic policies. Europeans will still be made to endure austerity. Me for spiked.
My lengthy review of Thomas Piketty’s latest 1,000-page-long tome, Capital and Ideology, for American Affairs. It’s an interesting book, with some radical theses (few authors nowadays dare to openly challenge private property), which unfortunately is led astray by the author’s globalist biases, which blind him to the fact that transnational democracy, let alone transnational socialism, is absolutely unworkable, even if it were necessary (which it isn’t, as I argue).
Mario Draghi is literally the bodily incarnation of the neoliberal political-economic model that has ruined Italy. He is the problem, not the solution. My take on the new Italian government for Unherd.
The coronavirus is shattering many neoliberal myths – the scarcity of money, the superiority of the market over centralised economic planning and the welfare state, the pros of EU/euro membership and economic hyper-intergration. But nonetheless we should be weary of pronouncing neoliberalism dead.
My take on the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic for unHerd.
Hey everyone, I’ve redesigned the site and taken down the old posts. Here’s a selection of articles of mine from the past few years:
