Archie Hall @ArchieHall Twitter profile

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Archie Hall

3 days

On @TheEconomist cover this week: my leader on the Labour party and British growth. Labour is saying many of the right things, but so far the heft of their policies doesn't match the ambition of their rhetoric. Big leaves; tiny carrot.

Britain’s Labour Party must be bolder about growth

Even if the economy peps up, taxes will have to rise

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

1/ Another addition to the list of "things the UK does worse than peer countries for foolish political reasons": VAT. My latest is on why the UK should be putting VAT on pretty much everything, and how VAT exclusions distort the economy and politics.

How to fix Britain’s barmy VAT regime

Britain’s second-most-important tax is riddled with holes

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

8 days

Not a new point, but what a policy failure on onshore wind in England. Rollout collapsed just when it should have been taking off.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

6 days

The crucial context for debates about Britain’s failure to build (chart via @resfoundation ):

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

Wrote this week about financial markets and elections - particularly the upcoming US election. Markets are worth watching both for a brutally frank look at an election's economic stakes and to see how speculators trade on those beliefs. Quick🧵on this

How to trade an election

It is becoming harder for investors to ignore politics

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

4/ A particularly foolish one is the exemption for small businesses, which pretty clearly incentivises businesses to stay small (and/or misreport their size). Here, Britain should substantially lower the threshold (which is 2-3x higher than the European avg).

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

A quick, and less-than-cheery, take on Britain's troubled water industry in this week's paper. Featuring mild spoilers for "Chinatown" (1974), which I think marked a high point in water utilities' cultural prominence.

How not to run a water utility

Let Thames Water go into administration. But after that, water bills need to rise

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

12 days

An annoying side-effect of the post-2019 divergence in US vs UK (+Fra/Deu) growth is that commentators can cherry-pick whatever difference they like between the two regions and loudly insist that it drove US outperformance. The US has done a lot of things over the last 5 years!

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦

@Noahpinion

12 days

Yep. This is why all these British publications (the Economist, the Financial Times) are delivering all these boneheaded, tone-deaf sermons about free trade, even as Britain's economy flatlines and America's economy continues to grow.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

Did a deep dive on the Bank of England this week. The past four years have seen inflation get seriously out of control in Britain for the first time since BoE independence. How culpable is the bank? What can it learn? Quick 🧵

How has the Bank of England dealt with four years of shocks?

Its credibility is battered but intact. It can do better

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

19 days

Weirdest of all is the notion that postwar Britain became services-oriented because free trade-ism let manufacturing wither. Britain in the 1950s-70s is a poster child for industrial policy propping up poorly-run companies / unviable industries and holding back growth!

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

2/ Start with two bits of factual context. First, VAT is incredibly important: it raised £168bn last year, more than any tax barring income tax/NI. Second, Britain's VAT regime is among the least efficient in the world. The chart below shows one measure from the @OECD .

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

6/ Regressivity could be much better dealt with elsewhere in the tax/welfare system -- and VAT exemptions often barely even hit households. One study (below) finds less than a third of the value of VAT exemptions actually pass through to prices.

Estimating VAT Pass Through

This paper estimates the pass through of VAT changes to consumer prices, using a unique dataset providing disaggregated, monthly data on prices and VAT rates for 17 Eurozone countries over 1999-2013....

www.imf.org

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

4 months

My latest (and first!) — on why the facts on Britain’s falling inflation have moved faster than the narrative, and why it might soon really be time for the BoE to ease

Britain’s economy will need rate cuts sooner rather than later

Inflation is coming down but worries about growth rise

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

19 days

Interesting, but kind of odd @Noahpinion piece. (Featuring critical shout-outs to both my current and former employers!) Key point he makes is that protectionism is on firmer ground if its purpose is national security not just growth/jobs. (cont.)

In which British writers scold America on trade

If you don't acknowledge the point of tariffs, how can you hope to criticize them?

www.noahpinion.blog

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

10 days

This is exactly the right framing of the Conservatives’ choices from @DavidGauke . A polarising offer to Reform-sympathetic pensioners may stanch the bleeding now, but it pulls the party further from the median voters necessary for a future majority.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

2/ But a lot of info is still embedded in what assets do and don't get pushed around by political shifts. And some really do -- the basket below from @Citrini7 pulls many of these together. Lots of examples in the piece, but one that stuck with me was European defence stocks.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

24 days

Five years into levelling-up, where is Britain on regional inequalities? Some conclusions in my latest in @TheEconomist : 1. If anything, Britain's regional gaps have worsened in this parliament 2. Politicians, execs and voters have stopped talking about levelling-up (cont.)

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

3/ VAT is pock-marked with holes-- the largest is exclusions on food but there is a long tail of others. Just the "non-structural" (i.e. easiest to remove) of them add up to around £70bn, that's 10x more than inheritance tax. Long past time to plug them.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

12/ Quite a few conversations went into this piece over the last month or so, but I'm particularly grateful to @DanNeidle @delaFeriaR and Stéphane Buydens for their input.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

13 days

Clear implication of the announcements on national service and the triple+/quadruple lock (but one that bears repeating): the Conservatives' internal polling must be dire Sunak is running an aggressive core vote and 'stop Reform' campaign. Labour gets the centre ground to itself

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

5/ The main reasons for these exemptions are pretty laudable: (a) Countering VAT's natural regressivity (poorer people use more of their income on consumption) (b) Encouraging socially-productive spending (e.g. on bicycle helmets, solar panel installations).

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

23 days

Good piece on prediction markets - saying prediction markets' issue isn't over-regulation but a lack of dumb money. Small markets full of sophisticated participants --> limited profit potential --> markets stay small.

Why prediction markets aren’t popular - Works in Progress

Prediction markets are legal, contrary to popular belief. But they remain unpopular, because they lack key features that make markets attractive.

worksinprogress.co

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

Portfolio protectionism is increasingly in vogue in Britain. Much-needed reforms to pensions and capital markets are getting muddled with a misguided push to get British savers to keep more of their money at home. Article and quick🧵on this:

The government wants investors to buy British

But protectionism is not the answer to years of underwhelming returns

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

I've spent a good bit of time over the past few weeks working through what lessons central bankers can draw from the latest bout of inflation. Short 🧵, to go alongside a just-published leader on this (more tomorrow specifically on the Bank of England)

Central banks have spent down their credibility

That will make inflation trickier to handle in future

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

8/ Of course the politics here are disastrous: any rationalisations get branded as a tax rise on everyday items. The lingering trauma of the 'pasty tax' (extending VAT to hot takeaways) from 2012 remains. And some areas (e.g. financial services) are genuinely practically tricky.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

11/ All that and more in the full piece:

How to fix Britain’s barmy VAT regime

Britain’s second-most-important tax is riddled with holes

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

Latest from @mattholehouse and myself on the budget. Loads in there, but the core tension is with the chancellor’s Jekyll and Hyde move— mixing inclinations to pragmatic technocracy with politically-motivated fiscal foolishness.

The British budget mixes sensible tinkering and fiscal fantasy

Both the Tories and Labour are making promises they cannot keep

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

My latest, on the long-running and at times bizarre spat over financial regulations consuming English football. Football's worth paying attention to, I think, even for non fans like me: it's a huge UK export and has fascinating internal economics 🧵

English football’s financial fracas

Financial-sustainability rules have caused an almighty mess in the Premier League

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

7/ And socially-productive spending encourages an endless flurry of campaigns to stretch the boundaries and add new exemptions- I list ten of them in the piece. A lot of well-intentioned effort is misdirected to adding tax distortions! One e.g. here:

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

Fiscal rules (and headroom against them) are pretty inescapable in conversations about Britain's economic policy. But how do they work, and should the UK even have them? I wrote on this dry-but-important area, article and quick thread below:

What fiscal rules should Britain have?

Labour has chosen its framework. Could it be better?

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

10 days

In which @tom_sasse becomes the rare Anglo writer to venture to Scandinavia and find a policy failure. Fascinating piece on where decades of rent controls get you.

Tom Sasse

@tom_sasse

11 days

It is remarkable how many Anglophone countries are getting stuck on the idea of rent controls as the answer to unaffordable rents. I went to Stockholm to see just how badly that approach goes wrong when combined with constrained supply @theEconomist :

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 years

Absurdly proud of @raffymarshall for holding our government to a higher standard than it clearly holds itself to. It’s a pretty damning indictment of the FCDO that he’s the one losing his job over this. But that’s their loss.

Laura Kuenssberg

@bbclaurak

3 years

Here is the full testimony from Raphael Marshall - - story here - chaos was there for all to see, but his testimony on what was going on behind closed doors is pretty jaw dropping

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

10/ That could be an enticing free lunch (in economic, if not political terms!) for any potential incoming government with a big majority and an appetitie for reform....

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

Excited to watch the hedge funds figure out how to brand every analyst a “policymaker”

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

9/ But the scope is there for big and helpful reforms. Think either a revenue-neutral removal of VAT exemptions and lowering of the headline rate, plus welfare top-ups; or even squeezing in some fiscally-welcome tax rises amid reforms.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

5 days

The biggest driver of Britain's productivity issue has been under-investment. More on why, and whether that may change, here:

Institute for Fiscal Studies

@TheIFS

6 days

Most investment comes from businesses, and this was rebounding until a sharp shift around the time of the Brexit vote. Since then, business investment in the UK has stagnated, with possible negative consequences for growth. [8/13]

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

6 days

new fiscal fiction just dropped My latest on economic growth in Britain, and why Labour needs a big boost to make the sums add up:

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

8 days

@OParsnips Planning rules changed

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

4 months

Niche content this week, but my latest is on inflation-linked bonds. Not a very inflation-protective financial instrument, but quite helpful otherwise, and these days often unfairly maligned.

In defence of a financial instrument that fails to do its job

Inflation-linked bonds are a poor inflation hedge, but that’s not the point

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

15 days

Really interesting window into the Biden admin's thinking on climate/trade from @robinsonmeyer . A much more internally coherent political economy case for tariffs than the crude natsec stuff. Still worry it's too-clever-by-half vs just getting costs down.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

19 days

And (b) if that was your goal, all this is a bizarre way to do it. Much better would be explicit support for a handful of defense-related industries and otherwise to bank the economic gains from extra-cheap EVs and solar panels. (Not least since climate matters too!)

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

4 months

In which I impersonate an exhausted civil servant plaintively hoping for a shred of fiscal rationality in an election year:

A memo to Britain’s chancellor, Jeremy Hunt

Pre-budget thoughts from a fictitious Treasury adviser

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

Frustrating Wired piece on EA. Flashes of interesting takes (limitations of giving-$ based interventions as paths to wellbeing; amateurishness of some cost-benefit analysis), but vastly uncharitable — ironically showing why EA-style sizing of the impact of your claims is needed

Leif Wenar

@LeifWenar

2 months

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

Level of Anglo soft power in the 3 Body Netflix show is off the charts. Pains me to say but I’m not sure every development of scientific/military/intelligence consequence is happening within 100 miles of London.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

1 month

Aim higher. Time for Chongqing-on-Thames?

London to become 'Manhattan-on-Thames' with 600 more skyscrapers in pipeline

10th annual tall buildings report from New London Architecture identifies 583 tall buildings of more than 20 storeys ‘queuing up in the pipeline’

www.standard.co.uk

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

1 month

Wrote this week on divestment-- and the often-ignored question of when, if ever, it's able to practically achieve much.

What campus protesters get wrong about divestment

Will withdrawing money hurt Israel?

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

4 months

Quick DIY tracker table for UK inflation (CPIH)-- many of the by-category moves here are just reversing the seasonal shifts from Dec. Notable how weak the 3-month change (which averages through the Jan/Dec moves) now is. (Groupings here are mine, don't always map to ONS ones).

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

4 years

A rather surreal feature of living in a post-Harry-and-Meghan-world is seeing my name now popping up all over.

Rob Jacques

@KnutCrosswords

4 years

sample clue from today's @Telegraph Toughie crossword: Cathar chieftain kidnapping Sussex lad (6)

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

1 month

This from the Guardian is of the comprehensively weirdest econ takes I've read recently. Less cohesively wrong so much as wrong in an odd, ill-directed, scattershot sort of way...

Tony Yates

@t0nyyates

1 month

Incredible that this embarrassing word salad is printed as an 'editorial':

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

4 years

Had a wonderful time tonight trying to untangle the complex, scary mess that is modern democratic politics with @TeamIndiaWSDC .

Team India WSDC

@TeamIndiaWSDC

4 years

Amazing #ISDSMasterclass by @ArchieHall on Comparative Political Governance right now! #GetsMyVote

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

12 days

@RachelReevesMP confirms that the list here is the sum total of Labour’s tax rises Makes the bid to stabilise pub finances / fix pub svcs totally levered to more growth (via ‘free’ measures like planning reform) and—less discussed but equally important—hoping interest rates fall

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

4/ But stepping back from single-names and looking at macro assets (bonds, equity indices, FX, etc.) there's a second story. Historically, politics hasn't mattered all too often to those assets. Good luck spotting elections on a long-run bond yield chart, for instance.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

1/ Important, first, to put aside any delusions about markets as perfectly insightful when it comes to politics. Marijuana ETFs are a great example (note the careful annotations below) -- rocketing up in the months around Biden's election before crashing down.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 years

. @JamesKanag and I spent a chunk of Easter Weekend mapping out Alba's likely impact on the Scottish Elections next month. Short story: Alba is already, at most, a few percentage points away from creating an "independence supermajority".

Salmond will help the Nationalists, but Galloway's party is bad news for Unionists

Two decades after devolution, the Scottish Parliament’s election system still confuses ordinary voters and seasoned political observers alike. Politicians on both the Unionist and Nationalist sides...

www.spectator.co.uk

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

12 days

3. Some loose sense of greater US dynamism, on both tech and planning — see colossal growth of renewables, housing construction especially in Texas/Sun Belt, tech, etc Sure I’ve missed a bit but my guess is most of the rest can’t explain more than a few 10s of bps of divergence.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 years

My latest in @JoinPersuasion , on the dark year that Hong Kong, my hometown, has had. The question that drove the piece for me — which I’m still not sure I have a decent answer to — is how to grieve honestly for what has been lost without capitulating into surrender and inaction

Persuasion

@JoinPersuasion

3 years

It's one year since Hong Kong's restrictive National Security Law. Thousands of pro-democracy dissidents have fled to the UK, Canada, and elsewhere. In Persuasion, @ArchieHall talks to them about the future of Hong Kong—and the price of their commitment to freedom. 1/3

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 years

A stray observation -- the CDU's polling collapse over the past three weeks has been *wild*, and seems to have received curiously little international coverage.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

26 days

Worth reading on how Starmer's Labour sees itself. Passage below hits a theme I struggle with in Labour econ thinking: ladles of worryingly protectionist rhetoric ("reshape markets", etc.) but quite benign policies (more STEM, investment- hopefully via proper planning reform).

Josh Simons for Makerfield

@joshsimonstweet

26 days

Labour today is not anti-Blair. It would be a special kind of arrogance to define a politics against Labour’s most successful project. But the electorate and the world have changed. That’s why Labour is and must be post-Blair.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

19 days

Which on one level is certainly fair! But (a) I'm pretty certain if you polled policy people (let alone voters), most would not say either that the main goal of this stuff was building a defense-industrial base or that doing so meant explicitly sacrificing economic dynamism.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

1 month

Every day the nimbys find new frontiers

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

12 days

My guess is that (in rough order) the drivers are: 1. European exposure to 2022 energy shock, vs US as an energy exporter (and beneficiary via LNG) 2. Greater scale of US post-Covid stimulus, which (ex energy shock) was more inflationary but probably did lead to a faster rebound

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

10 days

Labour breaking hearts on VAT well beyond the Treasury!

Hugo Gye

@HugoGye

10 days

Labour rules out broadening the VAT base - every single one of the 3,175 civil servants in the Treasury has their heart broken at once

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

12 days

And saying that the UK’s issue was over-excitement about free trade during the years that Brexit happened is … wild Chart below from OBR shows UK trade intensity collapsing over the exact same period

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

4 years

My — fairly sombre— reflections on Hong Kong’s future are now out in @JoinPersuasion . Do give the piece a read:

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

29 days

At the Musee Rodin the same weekend as Taylor Swift’s Paris dates Voice from behind: “Doesn’t that statue look like Travis Kelce?”

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

18 days

Poor taste on what was objectively quite a troublingly bad inflation release

HM Treasury

@hmtreasury

18 days

Inflation is now 2.3%. Let's stick to the plan.

2K

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

3/ Those have rallied a lot vs American equivalents as Trump's odds have improved, as prime potential beneficiaries of NATO weakening and European defence spending rising. Architectural glass companies as a social instability hedge (riots break windows) is another.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

18 days

Markets: this inflation data is bad enough to kill a June rate cut and drive a 2Z rise in gilt yields No 10:

Ben Riley-Smith

@benrileysmith

18 days

One to watch No10 has failed to rule out calling a snap election today (!!) after inflation got to near target Speculation rife in Westminster something's a foot. Silence from centre. One aide wonders if a reshuffle. Or just excitable chatter? Let's see

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

5 days

@GavinHJackson Biggest differential factor-- seems far more plausible that UK could have kept up w/ US/European investment levels than dodged a global TFP fall

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

6/ Much more on that all in the piece -- and the key long-run question here is whether Britain's chaotic experience presages a broader trend of politics mattering more for markets as fiscal policy gets more volatile and muscular.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

26 days

Enjoyed @ChrisGiles_ on rental inflation, but chart below isn't quite right. Zillow's rent index consistently ran hotter than BLS measures (CPI, NTRR, etc.) through 2010s. A little of that is visible in 2018-9. (1/3)

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

5 years

On the ⁦ @FT ⁩ News Briefing podcast this morning talking with ⁦ @mfilippino ⁩ on income share agreements — treating student debt as something closer to equity (not as dry, I promise, as it sounds!)

‎FT News Briefing: Monday, November 18 on Apple Podcasts

‎Show FT News Briefing, Ep Monday, November 18 - Nov 17, 2019

podcasts.apple.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

Pretty extraordinary how much public opinion on Brexit has now moved (+ been shifted by demographic churn) Raises the intriguing question of whether on other age-polarised topics (housing?), big moves might also happen faster than expected

John Peet

@JohnGPeet

2 months

Why most people now regret Brexit, my take from the two Richmonds: from @TheEconomist

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

12 days

On the broader issue: I’m sympathetic, but worry that people are vastly over-extrapolating from a US/Europe comparison that’s totally blown up by the two regions’ divergent experience with energy costs in recent years USA now is (overall) a big beneficiary of high energy prices!

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

26 days

Important question on whether there's any catch-up left in US rental inflation (big reason why CPI remains above target now). My sense is no: given the historical relationship between private sector new lease data and CPI data. So I'd focus on the dark not light blue line here.

Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

26 days

Enjoyed @ChrisGiles_ on rental inflation, but chart below isn't quite right. Zillow's rent index consistently ran hotter than BLS measures (CPI, NTRR, etc.) through 2010s. A little of that is visible in 2018-9. (1/3)

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

4 months

Standard caveats about being cautious re one-month moves, etc (esp given the strong wage print yesterday), but the sequential data really does look soft here to my eye. Look to e.g. the drop between the slower-moving Y/Y change on services ex-housing and the last 3-6m of data.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

Very cool work here by my colleagues

Can you build a British voter?

We break down the polls to explain how Britons might vote in the next general election

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

12 days

@s8mb Entirely agree! And I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re close to a bad equilibrium where infrastructure and the public realm are degraded enough from underfunding that they’re a drag on growth.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

5/ But politics' importance may be growing. Chart below, which I reference in the piece, shows the relationship between a measure of policy uncertainty and FX vol in the UK. No relationship until Brexit gets going, and a tight one since. (Or at least until post-Truss).

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

24 days

But much more on that all in the piece here: . And in addition to those tagged above, thanks to @ndrlee @ahawksbee @henryoverman @charliejmccurdy @CllrMarcus @EconArnab , Philip McCann, Charles Aldington, Ostap Paparega, and many others for their insights.

Is Britain levelling up?

Some town centres are getting prettier. Yawning economic gaps remain

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

1 month

This is really good -- two-sided but lands consistently in a v sensible place. Below on why the key takeaway this Fed tightening cycle is the importance of credibility and anchored expectations.

Jon Steinsson

@JonSteinsson

1 month

Did the Fed make a serious error in 2021? What changes should be made to the Fed's framework in its upcoming framework review? Here are my thoughts on these questions:

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

1 month

Enjoying being subtweeted in Scientific American

Deena Mousa

@deenamousa

1 month

I’ve noticed that a lot of highly rational people are still somewhat superstitious — I really enjoyed writing this article exploring why

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

Confounding my inner efficient-markets grump, mid-cap British equities jumped (very mildly) yesterday on the chancellor’s announcement of a 5k tax shelter for UK retail to invest domestically

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

5 years

Finally put together a few thoughts about Hong Kong that I've been sitting on for a while. Many thanks to @asiasentinel for publishing!

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

Key question here is how much we're willing to give up to stop clubs going broke. Chart below is from my playing around with some very cool data by @sszy -- the median insolvency isn't great for a club, but nor is it disastrous.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

Love this from LinkedIn

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

18 days

V cool chart in @JamesKanag latest: the Tories' structural FPTP boost has vanished thanks to a shifting Labour vote (more suburban, more in Scotland, more tactical voters). Wonder how long this'd have to stick to change the partisan/ideological valence of electoral reform.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

@woodchippings1 domestic passenger transport!

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

26 days

If that's true, that means if you expect housing to contribute to higher US inflation from here, it's going to have to come from rents rising even more (which is totally possible) -- not the lagged CPI data catching up to where they already were.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

Worth a read from Angus Deaton-- a mix of really interesting reflections (e.g. on economic vs historical notions of causality) and at-times unconvincing conclusions, to me at least, especially on migration/trade/globalization.

Rethinking Economics or Rethinking My Economics by Angus Deaton

Questioning one’s views as circumstances evolve can be a good thing

www.imf.org

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

11 days

Ultimately irrelevant because … polls … but it’s quite telling that despite the sound and fury on levelling-up, it’s still the first pot of money raided for a pre-election shiny object. I wrote on some of the unseriousness in levelling-up policy here:

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

12 days

But— think it’s fair to treat this crisis as a minor update in favour of greater labour market flexibility (w/ accompanying gov’t support). Makes me worry (parochially) that the direction of travel in the UK, e.g. in Labour’s agenda on workers’ rights, may be toward rigidity.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

My colleague @JoelBudd1 has found the elusive good news Britain story -- a really phenomenal piece on the realities of migration in the UK.

Without realising it, Britain has become a nation of immigrants

Another surprise: it’s very good at assimilating people

www.economist.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

2 months

If one wanted to be worried about a US-style inflation rebound in the UK (which I don't think I am quite yet)-- today's wages data does help make the case. Nominal wage growth has picked back up a bit (red and green lines below), and svcs CPI rose last month too.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

I may be missing something, but this looks like a pretty solid way to make 20% in ten months time

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

Citi makes the good point that if you get one notch more bearish on growth than the OBR forecasts, the UK’s fiscal position really does start to crumble. In that works, undoing the latest tax cuts could be just a minimum

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

4 months

Featuring one of the silliest charts in British tax policy

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

1 month

One place the UK looks under-taxed: environmental taxes (energy, transport, and pollution taxes) are taking in about half what they were 25 years ago, as a share of overall tax revenues.

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

12 days

Tentative consensus seemingly forming that the US had the structure of pandemic fiscal support right vs the EU/UK— i.e. getting $ to workers directly vs tying support to jobs. (Prompted by @KlaasKnot comments at Barclays/CEPR panel, but seeing the take all over the place.) 🧵⬇️

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 months

11/ Though I focus in the piece on Britain, these conversations -- on the tradeoffs between return-maximising diversification and investing domestically -- are live internationally. One recent example from Canada: (h/t to @greggmcclymont for flagging)

Canadian pensions face new call to invest at home, this time from major business leaders

financialpost.com

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Archie Hall

@ArchieHall

3 years

My remarkable friend Ravi ⬇️, do give him a follow

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