Come here for my reports ranging from the shanty towns of Kenya to the boardrooms of the City as I cover an agenda of "people, planet and profit".
15:10 UK time, Friday, 30 December 2011
In a normal year predicting economics is like predicting the outcome of a card game: there are too many variables and the only certainty being that the suckers will lose and the stealthily self-interested will win.
In 2012 however, the shape of the crisis is heavily predetermined: there are a series of crucial stages the eurocrisis has to go through and the way they're resolved will affect everything else.
12:19 UK time, Friday, 9 December 2011
We had been kidding ourselves. It always felt, when you covered a Brussels summit, that Britain was there on sufferance, but the rules said otherwise: technically we were and are an equal member of a 27-nation union whose oft-explained "three pillars" of governance were applied for the common good.
Now, as is clear from Thursday night's summit statement, these common institutions are to oversee a selective "fiscal compact".
12:38 UK time, Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Yesterday will be seen as a landmark in British economic history, and in British politics. It will relegate George Osborne's emergency budget of June 2010 to a footnote and elevate Robert Chote's happy-go-lucky assessment of our economic prospects in November 2010 to the status of a case study in predictive failure.
Because yesterday's Autumn Statement will set the political tone of the decade: it will tie the hands of future governments; and it has already brought a philosophical debate on the British right to an abrupt end.
13:41 UK time, Tuesday, 29 November 2011
Here's my snap assessment of the Autumn Statement. First the big analytical takeaways:
There is a fair bit of tentative dirigisme in there: a national infrastructure plan; transport links upgraded with macro-economic design; exemption from carbon targets for crucial industries; 100% capex tax exemption in the north of England.
12:48 UK time, Monday, 28 November 2011
It now looks like Chancellor George Osborne's growth strategy will have to be executed in a global environment of falling growth, more financial crisis and the breakup of old trans-national institutions.
That is not necessarily a disaster, as I explore below. But it changes the game.
12:13 UK time, Monday, 7 November 2011
...and who can't and who won't. The situation this morning summed up in a graphic:
More on Newsnight tonight. Meanwhile follow me on Twitter @paulmasonnews.
16:04 UK time, Friday, 4 November 2011
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
I've just had, as far as my French can comprehend, a verbal run-in with the President of the République Française. Nicolas Sarkozy came on stage with a face like thunder for reasons I will explain below. He took two questions from the French and Chinese press, and then me.
I asked: "It's evident that you and Mme Merkel, the two most powerful governments in Europe, are trying to change the governments of Italy and Greece. How is that just? And once it's started, where does it stop?"
15:13 UK time, Thursday, 3 November 2011
Mark the date: 3 November 2011. In Oakland, California, protesters - including workers - have blocked the operation of a major US port; in New York, one of the world's top stockbrokers is bust; in Europe the Greek government is on the brink of collapse, the Italian government in disarray and speculators are short-selling French sovereign debt in the expectation of a domino effect.
In Cannes, amid torrential rain, many of the leaders have adopted the Gallic shrug: what can you do? They had come to work on the fine points of a tactical adjustment to the crumbling world order - but instead, as one markets contact put it to me - all the stories on the news are merging into one big story.
16:50 UK time, Wednesday, 2 November 2011
Cannes, France: I can sense very clearly here at Cannes that this is the moment "the masses" start shaping the policy response to the global financial crisis.
Why? Because everybody I speak to, interview or discuss background with keeps dropping the words "Occupy Wall Street" into the conversation. In fact if #OWS were a global brand, like the designer apparel shops that line the Rue d'Antibes here, it would have a profile to die for among the super-elite.
12:48 UK time, Tuesday, 1 November 2011
The Greek referendum call is, while it lasts, effectively a plebiscite on euro membership.
I say "while it lasts" because the opposition is mobilising a parliamentary manoeuvre to bring down the government, which may succeed - returning Europe to its status quo of containable trauma.
13:38 UK time, Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
In search of a metaphor in this crisis, I repeatedly come back to tank armour. An ultra-modern tank is almost impossible to kill because it is covered with a mixture of ceramic, textile and metal plating that is designed to disperse the incoming energy of an anti-tank projectile: laterally.
After it's done its job the armour does not look pretty, but it works - as long as you don't get hit again.
15:00 UK time, Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Ask any actor, a mask is powerful. While the purpose of realism in acting is to strip away the pretence and make the actor expose their soul, on their face, for real - a mask does the opposite. It creates instant power and tension.
It makes the expression on the face immune to feeling, and therefore empathy. Masks are frightening.
11:27 UK time, Sunday, 16 October 2011
In February I wrote a blog called "Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere". With the global Occupy protests yesterday it is still looking quite accurate. But it's now clear there is a 21st reason. And a 22nd. We've had nine months of political paralysis. And people have begun to feel the economic permafrost setting in.
I went down to Paternoster Square to observe the first few hours of the London protest. The police sealed off the square, which is private property, so the protesters squatted the steps of St Paul's Cathedral. They had a big, sit-down general assembly and then broke into small circles, cross-legged, then got back together and decided to stay the night. At that point there were around 2,000 people.
14:38 UK time, Friday, 7 October 2011
There are two kinds of people at present: those who know in a vague way that the 1930s was a bad time, and those who have studied the detail and understand the economics of why it went bad.
The latter are now getting publicly terrified because they can see, very clearly, the danger of doing it all again.
11:30 UK time, Thursday, 6 October 2011
I only met Steve Jobs once, and it was not exactly a meeting. I'd been sent to cover the launch of iTunes Europe and, getting slightly nauseous at the scale of fawning over the guy and his 99p per track music, I decided to take a quite critical line.
My rationale was that in an age where P2P file sharing was taking down the walled garden of intellectual property rights, only a bunch of oldsters would go on paying for their music.
13:12 UK time, Wednesday, 5 October 2011
The basic situation this Wednesday morning, with markets yo-yoing and default insurance costs for major banks astronomic, is as follows:
1) Greece remains on the edge of default. Its revised budget deficit numbers on 3 October (8.5% deficit in 2011) were expected, but they mean any disbursement of the 8bn euro tranche by the Troika has to be done using the fig leaf of "we have plans to close the gap next year").
12:19 UK time, Tuesday, 27 September 2011
There has been much crowing over the "death of neo-liberalism", but actually we are moving into a phase beyond the collapse of a mere ideology.
Actual physical systems that were seen as permanent in the old era are beginning to fall apart. The world of rules is being replaced by a world in which rules are made up.
09:55 UK time, Sunday, 25 September 2011
On 13-14 September about 100+ movers and shakers took part in a conference and "war game" organised by the Breughel think tank, modelling solutions to the euro crisis. I am reliably informed this was not just a "what if?" but has - given the result - influenced crisis management in the non-war game world of Washington DC.
The full document is here. But the summary is: they saved the euro. Here's how.
12:59 UK time, Friday, 23 September 2011
The G20's communiqué today is a masterpiece of avoiding the specifics. I am not sure at what point it became obligatory to conduct economics in the language of Asquith-era diplomacy, but the problem with doing so is this - while things like the balance of power in Europe are necessarily intangible, the solvency of banks can be measured on a spreadsheet.
Let's decipher what they mean:
17:46 UK time, Wednesday, 21 September 2011
I understand the sticking point in negotiations between the Greek government and the Troika is the latter's demand "that by the end of the year the deficit will be 7.5 % and that all fiscal measures will give us this outcome".
The current projection is 8.5% of GDP. Many economists believe this is unachievable, given the projected shrinkage of the Greek economy, the deteriorating tax take and the newly revised growth projections of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the global economy.
Paul joined the BBC in 2001, making his first live appearance on the day of 9/11. He covered the corporate scandals that followed: Enron and Worldcom.
His groundbreaking reports on the rise of China as an economic power won him the Wincott Award in 2003. He has covered stories as diverse as Hurricane Katrina, gang violence on Merseyside, the social impact of mobile phones in Africa and the rise of Aymara nationalism in Bolivia.
Paul was one of the BBC’s first bloggers and has twice been nominated for the Orwell Prize.
He covered the collapse of Lehman Brothers live from outside its New York HQ and, “has hardly stopped for breath since then”, reporting on the social and economic impact of the global meltdown from the mean streets of Gary, Indiana to the elite salons of Davos.
Born in Leigh, Greater Manchester, in 1960 he studied music and politics at Sheffield University, switching to journalism in the early 1990s.
He is the author of two books: Live Working or Die Fighting, How the working class went global; and Meltdown: The end of the age of greed.
Insights into the the global struggle for peace and security
Latest on events, trends and issues in business and finance
Thoughts on the UK economy and how it affects us all
BBC © 2011 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.
This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.