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    The EPC's vision is to close the gap between economic policy and knowledge. Ultimately it brings together economic opinion formers - in academia, business, the media and government - in new and innovative ways.

    • QR codes now uploaded for 7 million pages on UKCrimeStats

    January 18th, 2012

    Posted: January 18th, 2012  Author:   No Comments »

    Last week, for the first time, I actually used the QR code (Quick Response) scanner on my Blackberry  and I belatedly realised what a great invention they are. No difficult and long urls – just scan and it takes you straight there and then you can share the QR code by facebook or email. UKCrimeStats has a huge and growing database of monthly information and we’re always trying to make it as accessible as possible. So we’ve decided to experiment and introduce an individual QR code for every single page on the site, right down to the individual crimes like this one, no. 1003 and streets like Oxford Street - QR code below.

    Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2012/01/18/qr-codes-now-uploaded-for-7-million-pages-on-ukcrimestats/

    Posted in UKCrimeStats | No Comments »

    Gas Boom Has Youngstown Making…

    January 10th, 2012

    Gas Boom Has Youngstown Making Steel Again – Bloomberg http://t.co/fDTgCjTZ no question the positive econ impact of shale gas in USA is real

    Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

    Eastern Europe – the calamitous cost of Foreign Currency Mortgages

    January 10th, 2012

    15 years ago, I went to go and live and work in Luxembourg for what turned out to be a very happy few years in pre-euro euroland. Latterly I was working in the Middle Office of a Corporate Treasury Department where I became familiar with interest rate swaps and how widely debt was priced around the world. I subsequently did a little investigation into taking out a foreign currency mortgage – specifically in Japanese Yen – which back then was paying next to no interest unlike all the other major currencies. Alas, I was politely rebuffed on the grounds of not really being a player !

    Obviously, a lot has changed since then. Today, it seems you don’t have to be a player at all. In fact, anyone can get them – especially if you are working/middle class Eastern European and not remotely interested in hedging for averse currency movements. So what happened?

    This Economist article from a couple of years ago gets it right by calling it Austria’s very own subprime invention. This table below, also old, sums it up quite nicely.

     

    Since then of course, it’s got substantially worse in nations like Hungary – now with a BB+ rating – as the Swiss Franc has superspiked in value, massively increasing the cost of CHF-based mortgages across Eastern and Central Europe - about 1.7 million in total apparently.

    So it’s not just Euroland that is in trouble with the Euro. What Donald Rumsfeld used to call New Europe is in trouble too – but with a quite different kind of currency problem.

    Would that our economic life and times be simple and predictable again, with all our living standards gently rising year after year !

     

    Posted in Currency, Eurowatch | No Comments »

    Data exclusive to People newsp…

    January 8th, 2012

    Data exclusive to People newspaper today from our platform UKCrimeStats – 50 worst crime streets http://t.co/TUD6PFPP see paper for detail

    Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

    Crime still falling in the USA – why?

    January 7th, 2012

    Posted: January 7th, 2012  Author:   No Comments »

    Of course our site – www.ukcrimestats.com –  is about British crime statistics, but we can’t ignore what’s happening in America. The big picture is that nationwide in the USA, crime has fallen a lot and continues to fall even through the recession and on the way out. The hard question is why?

    As this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, with rising unemployment and declining living standards, plenty of academics have got egg on their faces. Perhaps then, in the face of such inaccurate forecasting, criminologists are becoming the new economists?

    Well a couple of guests on this must listen to and well-balanced radio discussion programme on America’s NPR on falling crime in the USA have some pretty firm views of why it happened – a couple of which I’ve reproduced here.  You can freely download the mp3 too – so much easier to listen to in the car than sitting in front of your pc.

    Bill Bratton weighs in and argues that better Policing in NY and LA should take the majority of the credit because they targeted behaviour rather than “causes” like poverty and weather etc. which he downgrades to partial influences (quite rightly in my view). Charles Lane of the Washington Post points out that in the 90s the prison population grew 5 times faster than the population itself at 6.5% per annum. The challenge for the decade ahead though would be not just dealing with fewer resources dedicated to crime-fighting and law enforcement, but also how to get a large proportion of these inmates back into society and not relapse into crime as they would be released over the coming decade.

    Many of us Brits will already have heard of Bill Bratton, his work and quest to become the first foreign-born head of the London Metropolitan Police. For background on Charles Lane, read this detailed piece by him from late last month here that highlights the peace dividend from falling crime.

    The discussion came about because  academic criminologist, Franklin E. Zimring, wrote this book The City that Became Safe – New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and its Control. There seems be to an abridged pdf of 29 pages here too if you don’t want to buy the book – I haven’t read it yet.

    It strikes me that the level of debate on crime and more importantly, the freedom of Police Forces to experiment,  is far more advanced in America than it is here. For all that, based on a national arithmetic mean – almost totally useless as that is ! – recorded crime is still generally lower in Britain than America.

    Article source: http://www.ukcrimestats.com/blog/2012/01/07/crime-still-falling-in-the-usa-why/

    Posted in UKCrimeStats | No Comments »

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