Monday, April 20, 2015

IMF chief on growth and Greece; FT editor on China

Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, talks with the FT's World Trade editor, Shawn Donnan, about the global economic recovery, Greece and the new Chinese development bank.

"There has been a huge commitment by the international community, the European partners but also the IMF and the European Central Bank to actually support the Greek economy,” Lagarde said.

"What needs to happen now is that the political views need to actually deliver the measures, the tools, the reforms that could actually reach the objectives that have been set between the international community and Greece: restore stability, improve the economy [and] make sure that one of these days Greece re-accesses the financial markets on its own and without support.”

Technical negotiations in Athens between the Greek government and staff from the IMF and European institutions were “gradually picking up”, she said. “We really hope that is going to continue to fruition so that we can move on.”

 

China is attempting to assert its position globally, but economic growth is at its slowest for six years. Lionel Barber, FT editor, who recently interviewed the Chinese premier, talks to emerging markets editor James Kynge about the pressures facing Beijing.

On Sunday the People’s Bank of China announced a move to boost lending to business by cutting its so-called the reserve requirement ratio by 1 percentage point, days after data revealed the country’s economy expanded at its slowest pace for six years in the first quarter.

The FT reports that the PBoC has only once before reduced the reserve requirement ratio by as much and that was during the depths of the financial crisis in November 2008.

 

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

How not to be ignorant about the world

How much do you know about the world? Hans Rosling, professor of international health at Sweden's world renowned Karolinska Institute, who is also the world's most famous statistician, with his famous charts of global population, health and income data (and an extra-extra-long pointer), in 2014 demonstrated that you have a high statistical chance of being quite wrong about what you think you know.

Play along with his audience quiz in this video — then, from Hans’son Ola, learn 4 ways to quickly get less ignorant.

 

Hans Rosling in 2006: The best stats you've ever seen

 

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Data journalism

In 2012 Nate Silver correctly predicted the presidential election results for 50 US states and since then his FiveThirtyEight digital news operation has been acquired by ESPN, the sports cable network owned by Walt Disney. Nate Silver meets Matthew Garrahan, the FT's global media editor, at Manhattan's 21 Club to talk about the UK elections, Hillary Clinton and the growth of data journalism.