Intro

Hi everyone,

the idea behind this blog is to make a variety of news and opinions regarding economics, finance and politics easily available to a number of people who asked me for it. The background is that I wrote email updates similar to the posts that will follow (if I turn out not to be too lazy to do it) while I was working as an intern with an investment bank to other interns, and I figured I might as well continue to do it.

My own academic background is in economics, with my particular interest in monetary policy and its link to the financial system. Not exactly novel these days I admit (there certainly seem to be plenty of armchair experts out there), but for what it's worth, I can claim at least some degree of formal training in these matters. :p

To get things out of the way and make them clear right from the off: my political leanings are towards classical liberalism, ie the fundamental idea that humans have rights by virtue of what they are and should be free to act in the way they want provided they don't cause harm to others. In other words, my maxim is that there is no right not to be offended, and thus the only morally valid laws are negative, that is they protect people from harm done to them by others. So that means that I'm not a fan of laws locking in place social norms (ie I'm in favour of things such as gay rights, drug legalisation and the right to have an abortion on demand) or trying to redistribute from some to others (in effect declaring the interests or values of one group within society to be more important than those of others). I've also grown extremely cynical when it comes to politics and politicians. I'm not exactly alone in that of course, so I don't expect many annoyed comments on that front.

But this is not meant to be a blog discussing my political philosophy, I just want to make sure that whatever biases I have are out in the open.

So there we go. Enjoy.