economics

Big Economic Review of the Year 2019

Richard RamseyLeave a comment

Each December, we try to bring together some of the greatest minds in business and economics to review the year just past.

Unfortunately they’re never available. However, whilst you’re stuck with me, Richard Ramsey, we have been able to enlist the fantastic Stephen Kelly, Chief Executive of Manufacturing NI, and the incomparable Richard Johnston of Ulster University’s Economic Policy Centre to consider the good, the bad and the ugly of the NI, UK and global economies in 2019 and to speculate about who might be the economic villains of 2020.

We got together in Ulster Bank headquarters in Belfast earlier this week and covered a lot of ground… Have a listen and hopefully you find it useful and interesting.

Watch the podcast:

On-the-go? Prefer to listen to the review on SoundCloud?

Bye for now and have a great Christmas and New Year!

Three quarters full or three quarters empty?

Richard RamseyLeave a comment

They say a week is a long time in politics and it can also be a long time in economics. Over the past seven days, we’ve had a wave of data released that tells us much about what happened in the third quarter of the year and how the local economy is currently performing.

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The Big Economic Quiz of the Year

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What were the economic highlights and lowlights of 2018? What will be good, bad and ugly in 2019? Who will be next year’s economic villain? What word would you use to sum up what you expect to see in the next 12 months? These and many other questions about the Northern Ireland and global economies are asked and discussed in our new podcast, which we’ve boldly called the Big Economic Quiz of the Year.

And fittingly, we have some big fish from the local economics community contributing. Angela McGowan, Director of the CBI in Northern Ireland and Richard Johnston, Deputy Director of the Ulster University Economic Policy Centre join our own Richard Ramsey and business journalist Jamie Delargy to review, predict and ruminate.

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Economic Gongs: Best and worst performers in an ongoing drama

Richard RamseyLeave a comment

It had everything. There was intrigue, espionage, breakups, non-stop drama, and no end of fiction and fantasy. But whether you regard last year as the prelude to an economic horror, or something from an altogether more uplifting genre, what is clear is that 2016 was an epic, with significant implications for the local, national, and global economies. So with the annual Academy Awards having just been handed out, we’ve decided to suggest some potential winners of a hypothetical Economic Gongs. Here are the economies, personalities and organisations we think should be in contention for a range of bespoke categories.

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