Edward Hugh Mainpage: February 2015

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

EuroGroup - Money For Nothing And Your Debt For Free?

There's an interesting question about "analysis" which confronts anyone who seriously wants to engage in it: do you organize your focus around what you want to happen (practical policy emphasis) or do you concentrate your efforts in detailing and outlining what you think will happen? Naturally the closer you are to having an ideological discourse the harder this distinction is to either see or maintain. But even for "non ideological" thinking the issue is far from being an easy one. Whether or not there is any such thing as "objectivity" is a complex philosophical question and attempts to achieve it fraught with all manner of difficulty, but surely we at least have to try?

I raise this point, because while those who write what is called "sell side" analysis do no more (and no less) than the name suggests - no one would really think such work was either objective or independent - we shouldn't abandon too easily the objective as being unattainable.
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Monday, February 16, 2015

Spain's "Good" Deflation?

Spain's domestic economy is booming, or so the story goes, and in no small part this boom comes thanks to the arrival of what is being termed the "good kind of deflation", the sort everyone would like to have, a world where prices fall, real incomes rise, jobs are created, and everyone gets to live happily ever after. Let's not worry that in the process the boom is steadily transforming an export lead recovery into a domestic consumption - or import driven - one.

"Deflation is like cholesterol", Economy Minister Luis De Guindos told CNBC at the WEF in Davos, "There are two kinds.....The bad one and the good one. In Spain, you know, we have the good kind," So appealing was the story he told I'm surprised many of those in his audience didn't immediately get on a plane to visit the country to try to discover what the secret was. After all, sounds like the next best thing to a free lunch. Wouldn't anyone want some of that?
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Edward Hugh

Born in Liverpool Edward Hugh is a macroeconomist of British origin who has lived in Catalonia for over 25 years. For 20 of those years he lived and worked in Barcelona, but since 2010 he has been living in a small village near the town of Figueres.

Hugh, who studied economics at the LSE in the late sixties before going on to do Masters and Doctoral studies in Manchester, is an expert on the impact of demographic change and migratory processes on economic growth.

His work came to be known to a wider international public following the publication of a New York Times article highlighting his anticipation of the Euro Area crisis.

Since the start of the crisis Hugh has become a reference point for the international press in relation to the difficult economic situation in Spain.

He is an active blogger, and regular contributor to social network platforms like Twitter and Facebook where he is widely followed. He has no political involevment of any kind, and is proud of his reputation as an independent analyst-

In Spain he has recently published a book on the Spanish economy (¿Adios a la crisis?, Deusto 2014), and is a frequent contributor to the Barcelona press.

He is currently working on his next book - No Growth Societies - which will be written and published in English. He is also a regular speaker and participant in Forums and Economic Seminars, within and without Spain, a vocation which has taken him across Europe and the Middle East, from Brussels and Vienna, to Riga and Bergen, to Doha and Tel Aviv.