Summer’s drawing to a close, and there’s huge uncertainty about what is to come. Will a vaccine be approved this year? Will the coronavirus return with a devastating second wave? Will Lionel Messi really leave Barcelona on a free transfer? (Yes, no, maybe so are my unscientific opinions.) One of the stranger aspects of this summer has been the UK government’s approach to indoor dining. Many countries have banned it, out of concern that it’s a ripe breeding ground for

Many of us are entering a new normal where working from home is the standard, and spending hours of our day mindlessly commuting is a thing of the past. This has increased the amount of time at home people have to drink beer and binge-watch their favourite Netflix show (Below Deck in my case). The enjoyment we derive from killing our brain cells with these reality TV shows might be sufficient justification for this new way of working, but what

This is a job advert, as well as a blog. During the COVID crisis, Fathom (like many other organisations and individuals) has made a conscious effort to help in the ways that we can, by providing free, regular coverage of the pandemic and its impact on the global economy to clients and non-clients alike. It felt to us that this was a moment to stop worrying quite so much about the bottom line, and to focus on doing what we

Cheer up, it’s International Beer Day! Two years ago, we first published the BIRRA — the Beer IndicatoR of Real Activity — which showed an apparent relationship between the price of alcohol-related equities and quarterly euro area GDP growth. In the spirit of International Beer Day, and in light of the unprecedented COVID-led global recession, we’ve decided to revisit that analysis to see what, if anything, the BIRRA can tell us about the recovery. If there’s one thing we can

Economists like to compare things — UK GDP was 2.2% lower in the first quarter of this year compared to the fourth quarter of last year. Normal humans like to compare things too — Sally and Tom had a cat, which was fluffier than other cats A good, helpful, economist will put things into a little more context. For example, knowing that the Q1 print was the largest quarterly contraction since 1979 Q3, provides a little more colour. It’s also

Three weeks ago, I finished my studies and returned to hallowed halls of Fathom Towers, virtually at least, working on our Financial Vulnerability Indicator (FVI). While I would love to bore you all with the riveting decisions involved in building the FVI, most of you wouldn’t read past the first paragraph. So instead, I’ll use it as a neat hook to talk about something you’ll be far more interested in: the evolution of policy and why it matters now. For

"You’re indestructible Always believing ‘Cause you are gold!" From Gold by Spandau Ballet, 1983 Over the past 20 years or so, the US dollar price of an ounce of gold has risen six-fold, far outstripping the increase in the US CPI. Why is gold so expensive? If the market for gold extraction were competitive then, much like any other commodity, its price would gravitate towards the marginal cost of extraction. And if the marginal cost of extraction were to rise

My earliest memory of anything remotely related to economics was the financial crisis of 2008. I came home from school to find my dad keenly watching the news. The stock market had crashed, he told eleven-year-old me. I changed out of my uniform, ate a sandwich, and went to play cricket with my friends. A few years later, when I first started studying economics, the fallout from the crisis dominated the macro debate. It was all I was interested in.

Economics is, at its core, a study of markets. Goods markets, energy markets, financial markets — there are so many fields that it covers. That’s what makes it so interesting as a subject. But, one thing that’s often overlooked is our own market, the market for economic research and economic statistics. It’s an important discussion to be had, not just for ourselves, but also for users of our products. Economists define natural monopolies as markets with high fixed costs and

Never have we agonised over a forecast as much as our latest one, which was produced in the midst of COVID-19. And yet, like most other economic forecasters, where we came out was a collection of letters to describe the likely shape — an alphabet soup of V, U, or L-type scenarios. In a world of exceptionally high uncertainty and variation, this elementary take was the best place to begin. Underlying our scenarios were days of debate concerning the resilience