Finance: Past, Present and Future

According to Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's chief economist, bad managers are partially to blame for the UK's poor productivity statistics. You can access his speech here and press coverage of the speech is available here and here. I'm convinced that as the nature of companies, human capital and technology changes, there is a need for post-industrial approaches to management and leadership.
On Friday past I stepped down as Head of Queen's Management School. (This means that I will be able to blog more than I have been doing over the past 3 years!) During my tenure, I've spent much time thinking about leadership and how to manage talent. I now want to share those insights in a series of three posts over the next month or so. The three areas that I will be covering are (a) Managing Talent; (b) Managing Yourself; and (c) Managing Creativity. The lessons which I have learned are applicable to those outside the university sector - any organisation which needs tale…

Today is St Patrick's Day. There are many myths and legends surrounding Patrick, but thankfully he left us several writings. The most famous writing of all is the Confessio of St Patrick which speaks of his life and spiritual journey. The Confessio is available here in the original Latin, English, Irish, German, and Italian. 
Happy St Patrick's Day!

On Saturday I had the great privilege of contributing to the Glasgow Economic Forum, which is an annual event run by and for undergraduate students at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. I gave a lecture about my book Banking in Crisis and was part of a panel discussion (along with Nick Crafts, Catherine Schenk and Duncan Ross - see picture below) on the benefits of economic history to economics. 
I was really impressed by the level of debate and discussion - it was great to see so many (200+) young minds thinking deeply about economics. Furthermore, it was great to see so many young economists thinking about the discipline and thinking about the discipline in a heterodox manner. A lot of pressure has come from students on the economics profession to change the economics curriculum and make it heterodox or pluralist. A similar society to the Glasgow Economic Forum, called the Post-Crash Economics Society, exists at the University of Manchester.    

The Dow Jones and FTSE 100 reached record levels on Friday. The Dow Jones is just shy of 20,000 - see FT video below. At the start of each year, pundits  offer up their predictions for the year ahead. The consensus view seems to be that the US and UK markets are probably overvalued and that by the start of 2018, the Dow and FTSE will be at +/- 5%. from their current levels. However, we have no idea what 2017 is going to bring! Two things will have a major bearing on stock markets in 2017 - politics (Trump, Russia, euro, the French election, Turkey etc) and central bank decisions regarding interest rates. It might be a bumpy year for markets.