Coppola Comment

Yesterday, someone who had been watching one of my (all too frequent) Twitter arguments about money made this comment:  The "unknown person with few followers" was my protagonist. And the blue tick "classical expert" was me. I am Goliath.  But ten years ago, I was David. Armed only with Blogger and Twitter, and my knowledge of banking and finance, I set out to slay the financial Philistines that rampaged across the internet in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. I published my first Coppola Comment post on 20th February, 2011. It throws slingshots at a media pundit who had written an article about short selling, on which he was far from expert. You can still read it , if you like.  My early posts were rough and ready, and my terminology is at times excruciatingly loose, but I was sure of my subject. I understood British banking and financial markets well, though I had left RBS nearly ten years before. It was evident to me that the 2008 financial crisis in th

In a recent article for the New Statesman , the economics commentator Grace Blakeley makes an extraordinary claim. Writing about the origins of the IMF, she says: Seventy-five years have passed since these international financial institutions were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. Back then, delegates sought to tame the power of international finance, the growth of which helped to cause the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Great Depression. JM Keynes – who led the British delegation – arrived at Bretton Woods with the aim of “euthanising” a financial elite he viewed as parasitic on productive economic activity. I thought that Bretton Woods was about free trade and economic cooperation, not "taming the power of international finance." But I can be wrong. So I checked it out. According to the U.S. State Department , Bretton Woods was indeed born from the U.S.'s dreadful experience in the worldwide depression of the early 1930s. But it was no

In my recent post on the difficulty I have with mathematics, some of the comments appeared to suggest that mathematical objects that could not possibly exist in nature - such as perfect circles - nevertheless had objective "reality". This to me raises a fundamental question: can things that have no physical existence, but exist only in the mind (or in a computer representation of the human mind), be "real"? This is not wholly a metaphysical question. I think it lies at the heart of the ongoing debate about the relevance of finance and economics to the world economy. To me, economics is fundamentally a means of describing and predicting the transactions between real people for the real goods and services that they produce using the real resources of the earth. It is not about mathematical proofs, though economists do seem to spend a lot of their time developing these (not always with much relevance to the physical world). Nor is it, really, about money. But