Activity

Capital controls are taxes, and differ from exchange controls. The latter place limits on the amount of a nation’s currency that can be taken abroad. Instead, the financial transaction tax or Tobin tax is a form of capital control, a tax on and ‘sand in the wheels’ of capital flows.

The economics profession regards the subsequent failure of economic activity as the new norm – ‘secular stagnation’. Interest rates are thought merely to reflect in a passive way this dismal outlook, one expected to extend indefinitely into the future.

However, business is better than usual for rentiers

the never-ending capacity of language to lead further on in its semiotic delight

as far from Roget as literature is from lepidoptery