Warwick Lightfoot's Substack

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Macroeconomics

Mathematics and Economics or Black Magic and Alchemy?
Economic data is complex, not reliable for causation. Economists should heed Romer’s Mathiness warnings and Keynes, Friedman on statistical alchemy.
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Warwick Lightfoot
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US Capital Account and International Finance
US economy has it all: modern productive services, science, and technology, capacity to mobilise the savings of the world to finance its investment, and…
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Warwick Lightfoot
Structure of the US Balance of Payments and Capital Account
Dissecting the US Current Account: Trends, Transformations, and the Path from Hyperglobalization
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Warwick Lightfoot
Trump Administration’s Tariff Policy and the case for Unilateral Free Trade
Countries should embrace Ricardo’s Comparative Advantage, open markets, remove tariffs and impediments to trade, give effect to their self interest…
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Warwick Lightfoot
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Industrial Revolution, inventing Political Economy, relative 20th century British economic decline and the creation of a modern…
It made Victorian Britain egregiously rich, but its costs stimulated a political antithesis that provoked a generation of socialist policies and a…
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Warwick Lightfoot
UK’s Spring Economic Statement focuses on Redundant Fiscal Rules, Neglecting falling Productivity, Profits, the falling Rate of Return on…
UK has supply-side problems arising from high public spending, taxation and labour market regulation that deliver weak productivity and falling profits
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Warwick Lightfoot
Kaput: German and European Economic Institutions set up for economic success sixty years ago are now in a Structural Slump
Germany’s economic miracle ended years ago, Germany and Europe’s Mercantilism, Rigid Fiscal Rules and resistance to technology need to go
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Warwick Lightfoot
Challenge of over expanded public sectors: in the UK, Europe and North America
Elevated public expenditure crowding out private sector growth, is a problem in advanced OECD economies, the UK offers an egregious example, the EU…
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Warwick Lightfoot
Labour’s share of national income rises in the UK, while profitability falls
Unlike other economies wages as a share of GDP have risen in the UK since the mid-1990s, while profits have fallen, reflecting a flexible labour market…
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Warwick Lightfoot
As the UK Labour Market Becomes Less Flexible and Efficient, is the Minimum Wage Lowering Productivity Growth?
UK labour market is becoming more regulated, minimum wage regulation is compress pay differentials and a Manhattan Skyline of marginal tax rates damages…
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Warwick Lightfoot
Labour 1974-79 : Demolition of the British Keynesian Demand Management, Deindustrialisation and the accommodation of Trade Union Power
By 1970 Keynesian demand management had run out of road, by 1979 Keynes’s policy legacy was dead, but a practical macro-economic replacement was yet to…
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Warwick Lightfoot
The Economic Legacy of Edward Heath: an Economic Crisis and State of Emergency
1970s union militancy, unemployment and inflation, aggravated by a Keynesian reflation, price and wage control, a profits crisis, combined to provoke a…
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Warwick Lightfoot
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