Economists v the Queen; bashing the banks; piracy is falling and weird cakes: links I liked

A Pythonesque set of posts from various economists in reply to Queen Elizabeth II’s (no really) challenge on why their profession failed to predict the credit crunch. Pick up the trail with Thomas Palley, Lawrence Haddad or William Easterly, (among  a lot of others)

As Wall Street moves into BABble (‘bonuses are back’) mode, Paul Krugman inveighs against some new ‘privately profitable, socially useless’ bank practices such as the use of superfast computers to impose a private tax on the stock market . Global Dashboard joins in arguing that ‘quantitative easing’ is largely a massive snouts-in-trough exercise for Banks fixed income teams

Despite all the hype about Somalia, global piracy is actually declining

And eclectic doesn’t even begin to describe Chris Blattman’s blog. Here he brings us people tucking into a yummy full size cake replica of Lenin’s corpse…. , and here he links to the UK street artist Banksy’s work in Africa