Author: Sergi Basco, Profesor Agregado de Economia, Universitat de Barcelona

After the US and Israel began their military strikes on Iran on February 28, oil and gas markets were plunged into chaos and energy prices shot up. As of today, Brent Crude Oil prices are 20% higher than in late February. They went from around $70 a barrel in late February to quickly surpassing $100, […]

After the US Supreme Court ruled against President Trump’s import tariff measures, his first reaction (after harshly criticising the judges who ruled that he had exceeded his authority) was to announce another 10% global tariff. Shortly after, he threatened that the new US tariff would be 15% instead of 10%. Officially, the only signed executive […]

Booms and busts are a recurring feature of modern economics, but when an asset’s value becomes overinflated, a boom quickly becomes a bubble. The two most recent major bubble episodes were the dot-com bubble in the United States (1996-2000) and the housing bubbles that emerged around 2006 in different countries. Both ended in recession – […]

On 25 September 2025, it was announced that 9 european banks, including UniCredit, ING and CaixaBank, have launched a consortium to issue a euro stablecoin – a cryptocurrency with a value pegged to the euro. While stablecoins are less volatile than regular cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, they are not, despite their name, inherently stable. Allowing banks […]

On June 17, the US senate passed the GENIUS Act, which was seen as a big win for the cryptocurrency sector. The bill aims to regulate a type of cryptocurrency known as “stablecoins”, but a closer look at the law reveals that it could, quite easily, lead to the next global economic crash. To understand […]

A global reserve currency is one that is extensively held by foreign Central Banks. Since the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement this position has been occupied by the US dollar and it still holds true – according to IMF data from late 2024, the dollar represented 54% of global official reserves, while the euro came in […]

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has just published its World Economic Outlook, and it does not take an expert to deduce that, even among some of the world’s top economic minds, confident predictions are currently hard to come by. Every spring the IMF and World Bank hold their Spring Meetings in Washington DC: a week […]