zugzwang

The Efficient Market Hypothesis is trivially true. In a normal liquid market there are no easy to find patterns or correlations that can be exploited for profit. Normal market statistics overwhelmingly reflect the behaviour of noise traders (chartists). Without a falsifiable statistical model to structure their trades, or a great deal of luck, amateurs will consistently lose or underperform the market.

Stock markets are driven by liquidity primarily, with sentiment and fundamentals a distant second/third. As long as cash keeps flooding out of the BoJ, ECB and PBoC then prices should keep grinding higher. All that will change when Yellen finally steels her nerves and pulls the plug.

Check out Benny's dirty sanchez look from back in the day.

Janet Yellen poses for a commemorative photograph with interns from the Eccles Building.

Economists have half a dozen definitions of equilibrium. Most of them derived inconsistently from 19th century physics, and all of them wrong. Except under trivial circumstances Nash equilibria are intractable. Real financial markets are complex in ways that are not amenable to any kind of equilibrium analysis, even approximately. As Per Bak said, equilibrium is the condition of a glass of water at rest. Nash's failure to recognise the towering insights of Godel and Turing in his work should have given the game away; in fact his colleagues at RAND were generally dismissive during his time there and afterwards (von Neumann knew Godel personally, of course). Nash's post-hoc canonisation in the 80s and 90s from 2nd rate mathematician to neoclassical cornerstone was largely a political contrivance designed to reinforce the idea of sovereign markets and rational actors. Nash's optimisations make infinite demands on the computational resources of those who attempt to employ them, something that could have been established empirically, but wasn't - like so many false conjectures in modern economics. Adam Smith certainly didn't make the same mistake, he believed that moral sentiment was every bit as important as rational calculation.

Given that the UK economy is about fifteen minutes and a head cold away from recession again, why would they put rates up?

Whatever happened to the massive boost in consumer spending that the oil slump was 'for sure' certain to generate? More fairytale economics.

Ha, of course they do! Lest the truth of Gidiot's 'recovery plan' is exposed. It's also somewhat misleading to aggregate debt in that way since the economic cycles of nations are never perfectly synchronous. Steve Keen's corrected chart of US debt/GDP (below) illustrates that both the Great Depression and the Great Recession occurred when US private sector debt hit ~175% of GDP. The subsequent spike to 240% of GDP in 1932 was a consequence of the slump in current prices that took place during 1930 and 1931.

Lovely, lovely. The 2012/13 credit impulse from HtB and FLS appears to have fully exhausted itself, as I suspected would be the case by now, and the looming oil shock should kick the UK ponzi economy back into recession this summer. Meanwhile, as US rates go up for the first time in seven years creating an almighty credit squeeze, the long-distance nutter in Threadneedle Street will be left with no alternative but to unleash moar QE. The Keynesian hoons really don't know what they're doing, do they?

Assuming, of course, that a Nash equilibrium is computable - there's no reason why that should be the case - and that the time taken to attain equilibrium (exponential in the number of agents and their memory size) is not impractical. In real financial markets these twin constraints (finitistic computability and computational complexity) ensure that equilibrium is never observed, or even sought for. In that sense, at least, your hypothetical robot society is very different to us.

Fitch downgrades Japanese govt debt to A over 'fiscal concerns'.

The ONS rental index covers all tenancies, old and new. Tenants who have remained continuously at one address for the last seven years have done relatively well vs cpi (albeit from a very high base). New tenants, and those forced to move, have had an entirely different experience - as captured by HomeLet's rental index of new tenancies (below). This demographic tends to be younger and/or less affluent than the broader community of renters. http://homelet.co.uk/assets/documents/M3692-March-2015-HomeLet-Rental-Index-14.04.15.pdf Recent trends: In the first quarter of 2015, average rental values for new tenancies in the UK were 10.2% higher than the same period last year The annual growth in average rental values for the first quarter of 2015 (10.2%) was higher than quarter one 2014 (4.9%) and quarter one 2013 (3.6%) In the first quarter of 2015, average tenant incomes were 1.9% higher than the same period last year Average rents for new tenancies in London are 8.4% higher than the same period last year Average rental values for new tenancies in London (£1,443pcm) were £112 more expensive per month when compared to average rental values in the same period in 2014 (£1,331pcm) When London is excluded, the average UK rental value in March 2015 was £733pcm - this is 8.4% higher than the same period last year (£676pcm) In the first quarter of 2015, average rental values have increased in eleven out of twelve regions in the UK

There's a 70s-style stagflationary oil shock coming. No, wait... there really is!

Be nice to be the lion for a change.

I've got a better idea. Let's establish a League of Failed Economists and seek to abolish their tenure instead.

I've no idea, perhaps that's why I find the premise absurd! Ecological literacy is one of the things that appears to be missing; any sense of complexity, really. But then the whole Technological Singularity flimflam seems wildly archaic in our post-2008 world of recurrent, intensifying financial crises and secular stagnation. Once again, the future ain't what it used to be.

Oil price drop triggers wave of profit warnings from North Sea producers. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/oilprices/11562139/Oil-price-drop-triggers-wave-of-profit-warnings.html/ The NS appears to befollowing much the same pattern as the US shale scrubs. Too early to say whether this has legs and can flush the USUK reamcoveries down the toilet but the hedging contracts that have kept several afloat are about to expire.

The City of London and the Keynesian collective at the BoE will never let an EU vote happen. A minority Tory govt and Cameron gets replaced by Boris Johnson. A majority Tory govt and Cameron gets replaced by Boris Johnson. A second Coalition govt and Cameron gets replaced by Boris Johnson. No Tory govt and Cameron gets replaced by Boris Johnson.

More victims of Keynesian collectivism. Property rights count for nothing if they can be instantly revoked by a central banker.

You neglected to mention the BoJ: Twenty-two straight months of declining real wages through Feb 2015. Relative currency movements don't matter? Try telling the South Koreans, as their export markets get squeezed to death by the swooning yen.

I can't imagine he'll be going back to Canada, where the increase in household debt since the crisis is second only to bankrupt Greece. A desk by the window at the IMF sounds about right. One more Keynesian hoon on the roster.

Maybe not a great idea on its own without additional reforms to the housing market but it could be just the thing to establish the rental vote as a block 'special interest' on the political landscape which all parties in future will need to address in some way or another. Miliband appears to be leading the agenda again, as he did over energy prices.

Too much emphasis on rationality and equilibrium and not a word about robustness and uncertainty! The future as imagined by an economist rather than a biologist. And yet who knows more about complexity? A Dyson shell around the Sun, even if it could be constructed, would have little protection from the solar wind and coronal mass ejections, or from the impacts of extra-solar bodies no longer deflected by the heliosphere.

There's something of the afterlife about him, no question.