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Alasdair Macleod



Articles by Alasdair Macleod

Why GDP Metrics Won’t Tell Us Much about the Post-COVID Recovery

June 7, 2020

In seeking to measure everything, econometricians gave us the dubious gift of gross national product and gross domestic product, the latter being in fashion today and the former in times past. Although there are different ways of measuring it, GDP is commonly taken as a measure of spending, comprised of household spending, government spending, investment spending, and net exports. The Bank of England’s guide says that it is a measure of the size and health of the economy. And the US’s Bureau of Economic Analysis similarly says, “the growth rate of GDP is the most popular indicator of the nation’s overall economic health”.
Although GDP is a measure of the size of an economy, it is an error to describe it as a measure of the economy’s health. Economic theory and

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Will a Credit Crisis Threaten Boris’s 2020 Brexit Plans?

January 15, 2020

Boris and the Conservatives won the General Election with a very good majority. In truth, opposition parties stood little chance of success against the Tory strategists, who controlled the narrative despite a hostile media. At the centre of their slick operation was Dominic Cummings, who masterminded the Brexit leave vote, winning the referendum against all the betting in 2016. It was Cummings who arranged for the Tory Remainers to fall on their swords, which by removing the whip reduced the Tory ranks, making them appear vulnerable enough for the opposition parties to tear up the requirement for a supermajority and vote for a general election.
It was straight out of Sun Tzu’s playbook: “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the

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Valuing Gold In A World Awash With Dollars

July 30, 2018

In this article I point to the pressures on the Fed to moderate monetary policy, but that will only affect the timing of the next cyclical credit crisis. That is going to happen anyway, triggered by the Fed or even a foreign central bank. In the very short term, a tendency to moderate monetary policy might allow the gold price to recover from its recent battering.
Unlike the last credit crisis when the dollar rose sharply in a general panic for safety, on the next crisis, the dollar is likely to fall substantially. The reason is that foreign ownership of dollar investments (typically in US Treasuries) appears greatly overextended, and an additional $4 trillion of liquidity is in the wrong (non-US) hands. This is

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