Once the week's work is complete, Fathom staff, on occasion, are permitted to help themselves to a light ale from the company fridge. But what if they were to indulge in something stronger? Smoke a little cannabis perhaps? Such an idea is unlikely to pass muster with management, not least because the substance is banned in the UK! But in other parts of the world such behaviour would not be as far out as it sounds: several US states have

Let's face it, 2016 was not a good year for political pollsters. The breakthrough year for nationalism was met with shock results for both Donald Trump becoming the President of the United States and the UK's decision to leave the EU, with polls underestimating the respective likelihoods of such events. However, the results of the first round of elections in France suggest Europe's second largest economy will stay on the internationalist side of the line. Centrist Emmanuel Macron won the

According to a poll conducted by Elabe, through Wednesday and Thursday of this week, 24.0% of the French electorate will vote for M. Macron in round one of the French Presidential elections, to be held this Sunday. It also suggested that 21.5% would vote for Mme Le Pen, 20.0% for M. Fillon and 19.5% for M. Mélenchon. To our mind, and particularly in light of recent electoral experience, that makes the result 'too close to call'. Put more formally, on

It may only be Thursday, but with a four-day weekend starting tomorrow, it is appropriate that we send our weekly TFiF publication today: Thank Fathom it's a Four-day weekend (TFiFdw). The US military strike on a Syrian airbase may have dominated the headlines this week, but economists are still wondering just how Donald Trump will narrow the US trade deficit. Donald Trump's meeting with Xi Jinping passed smoothly. China is not a currency manipulator. There has also been a softer

It will have escaped the attention of very few people active in the financial markets that long-term real rates of interest are low. Very low, in fact. Anyone buying a ten-year index-linked gilt today, and holding it to maturity, is guaranteed a real-terms loss of some 2.0%. That doesn't seem right, does it? What should determine a country's long-run real rate of interest? Economists have a bit of a long-winded answer, and it runs something like this. Ultimately, a country's

38915.9. To this day, that remains the Nikkei 225's all-time high, reached on 29 December 1989. Since that time Japan has suffered the best part of three lost decades, with little or no growth, and little or no inflation. Japan's woes were triggered by the bursting of its asset price bubble, which saw a collapse in both equity and land prices. Inevitably, non-performing loans (NPLs) rose sharply through the early 1990s. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to

It was International Women's Day (IWD) this week - that time of the year when the world dedicates a full twenty four hours to celebrate the achievements of half its population. In the economic press, IWD has become an annual exploration of wage inequality between men and women. According to the latest research, the UK's gender pay gap is 18% - a very high number indeed. But perhaps the biggest source of income inequality between men and women around the

Wind the clock back to 2012. The single currency bloc was hit by what economists like to call an 'asymmetric shock', in the form of a good old-fashioned banking crisis. Countries with astronomically large banking systems compared to the size of their economies, including Ireland, Iceland and Cyprus, were hit particularly hard, along with those such as Greece, whose public finances were already in a state of disarray. In Cyprus, the situation was particularly acute. Cypriot banks failed en masseand