Matthew Lynn

Matthew Lynn is a financial columnist and author of ‘Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis’ and ‘The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031’

Two reasons why Andy Haldane is right to worry about inflation

Companies are facing critical shortages of staff. Commodity prices keep spiking upwards. Central banks are printing money on an unprecedented scale, and governments are running deficits of a size that haven’t been seen in peacetime before. What could possibly go wrong?  Well, quite a bit, as it happens. And the departing chief economist of the

The German takeover of the EU is accelerating

Vetoes should no longer be allowed. Smaller countries should not be able to block the will of the ‘majority’. And the biggest countries, with the largest financial contributions, should be the ones that get to dictate policy. Ever since German re-unification made the country by far the largest in the bloc, there has been a

The G7 tax deal is an unworkable mess

Poverty will be abolished. Governments will be able to spend again. Inequality will be eradicated, our welfare systems secured and the power of the tech giants will finally be curbed. We will hear a lot of hype about today’s global tax deal. Given that the liberal-left have spent the last decade complaining that the main

Tim Martin isn’t a Brexit hypocrite

Heinz is expanding a huge factory in the UK. Tesla is reportedly scouting the north for locations for a new car or battery plant. Even the pound is bouncing to three-year highs.  It has been a difficult few weeks for some hardcore Remainers. Still, at least there is finally something to cheer them up. Tim

The EU is overplaying its hand on Northern Ireland

The EU’s decision to take control of the vaccine programme was hardly a roaring success. The eurozone’s economy remains stuck in recession. And the EU’s foreign policy is a mess, as events in Belarus have just made clear.  Still, despite the evidence that she isn’t very good at managing anything, no one can argue that

Inflation is the biggest threat to Boris

The vaccines are rolling out. Lockdown is easing, the EU has been forgotten about, and the Labour party has returned to its traditional pastime of plotting furiously against its leader. No one is even talking about wallpaper anymore. Things could hardly be going better for Boris Johnson, and that has been reflected in local election

Why the EU keeps losing against big tech

They shift revenues around. They create endless shadowy shell companies. And they undermine the social model by dodging taxes. To the European Union, the American tech giants, when they aren’t busy destroying democracy and hollowing out local economies, are paying far too little to the state, and it is the only organisation with the muscle

Rachel Reeves can easily make life difficult for Rishi Sunak

There is one thing to be said for Anneliese Dodds: as shadow chancellor, she set the bar very low. Virtually invisible, with few ideas, and a manner designed to send even political obsessives to sleep, her successor Rachel Reeves won’t have to do much to look like an immediate improvement. A wet tea towel would

Merkel is right to reject Biden’s vaccine patent plan

She handed the vaccine procurement process over to the European Union. She didn’t invest much in new production. And she allowed an American multinational to take control of a brilliant discovery by a small German biotech company. Angela Merkel, the out-going German Chancellor, has not had much success battling the Covid-19 crisis, and her handling

Michel Barnier’s Brexit diary shows he needs a lesson in diplomacy

David Davis was ‘truculent’. Dominic Raab was ‘almost messianic’. Theresa May was ‘rigid. While Boris Johnson kept asking to borrow a tenner and whether it would be okay if Carrie joined the meeting.  Okay, I made that last one up, but the rest are among the startling revelations contained in Michel Barnier’s Brexit diary, published

Ireland’s low-tax miracle is over

Okay, in fairness it might be the weather. Or the craic in the bars. Or the rugged coastline, golf courses, or the lakes. And yet for all its charms, there was always a far simpler reason why more than a thousand multinational companies have their main European headquarters in Ireland. Tax. For a generation, Ireland

The eurozone’s Covid recession has arrived

The US is booming. The UK is set to grow at the fastest pace in half a century. China is expanding again at a blistering pace. Stock markets are rising. And commodity prices are racing ahead.  Across most of the world, economists are starting to worry about a runaway boom, stimulated by too much easy

The EU will regret suing AstraZeneca

Well, that will teach them to go around manufacturing a vaccine against a global virus at cost price, and at record speed. The European Union has today said it is planning to take legal action against the pharmaceuticals conglomerate AstraZeneca for failing to deliver enough doses of the Oxford shot on time.  No doubt European

Juncker’s Brexit delusion

Regrets? It turns out he has a few. The former president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker does not seem too bothered by the EU’s miserable growth rate during his time in office, its geopolitical marginalisation, or indeed the growing power of corporate lobbyists in Brussels. But there is one thing that makes him at

In defence of football’s Super League

Short of dropping Harry Kane from the England team, and replacing him with Andy Carroll on the grounds that what we really need is a big man up front, it is hard to imagine a footballing decision that could be less popular. Twelve of Europe’s biggest clubs, including Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool, have announced

Money to burn: shoppers, not the state, will lead our recovery

Compared with the United States, the UK has so far been relatively cautious about launching stimulus programmes to kick-start the economy. And yet perhaps it doesn’t need to. People are paying off their credit cards, putting some money into the stock market, buying new houses, as well as finally booking a restaurant and getting back

What happened to the great Brexit trade chaos?

The ports would reek from the smell of rotting fish. Factories would close en masse as orders got snarled up in red tape. There would be chaos at the borders as deliveries were blocked, and services would hit a wall of ‘non-tariff barriers’ that would make it impossible for British firms to sell them across