Economics and finance geekery …

I am Claus Vistesen, and I have long since reached the (un)enviable point where I can't really describe what I do, or who I am, in one sentence. I am Danish, 39 years old, and live in south London. I am formally trained as an economist and have more than a decade’s experience working for independent macroeconomic research firms. I am currently employed as Chief Eurozone Economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics, which gives me the privilege to work together with a group of very smart likeminded people.  Normal disclaimers apply. This is my playground and unless stated otherwise, the views expressed here are my own and does not represent the opinion of my current or previous employers.

This site is mainly a way for me to present my ideas to the world, and it will evolve accordingly. Economics and financial markets are my passion, and are the red thread for the content presented here. The blog Alpha.Sources is the heart of the site, and you should bookmark its RSS feed or sign up on the email list. I will post updates, articles, podcasts, and charts there, and link to the rest of the site or externally if I need to. There, I said it. This site is really a glorified blog! On that note, I am very honoured to be included in the list of the top 100 economics blogs, compiled by Intelligenteconomist.com.

I am also active on Twitter, which is the best place to go if you want to know what I am thinking about. Feel free not to of course, if you're uninterested. But finance Twitter or "FinTwitter" as it is nicknamed is a great little community, and as long as you are armed with critical sense, I recommend you to plug into it. The same is the case for the econ-blogosphere which is a collage of academic economists, investors and econ-geeks who use blogs to inform the world of their views. Some do it well, some don't. We used to do blogrolls, but that was back in ancient times. Now I encourage you to go explore on your own. Markets are conversation in the end. Substack is where all the cool boys and girls write these days, I hear. I am curating a reading list on Substack, which I suspect I will use on the blog soon enough.

I also want to highlight my friend and colleague, the UK/Catalan economist Edward Hugh. Edward sadly passed away in 2015, but his ideas and writings are saved for posterity via the the link above, and the books he published through Amazon. Go have a look.  I am certain that you will learn a thing or two. 

I worked closely with Edward for many years on many projects, chiefly of which was global population dynamics, population ageing, and the interaction between these two and macroeconomic processes. I have spent the last year reviving this project. I hope my readers will find this work, and the journey that I am taking doing it, useful.

…with a dash of fiction 

The art of non-fiction writing is a critical part of my day-job, and it was only a matter of time before it spilled over into creative writing. My fiction is eclectic, and mainly consists of short stories, but I am also working on a couple of novels. As a young reader I plowed through the Dragon Lance and Forgotten Realms fantasy books, before university demanded that I devote my time to the arcane art of economics and business. I almost always have anthologies of new and old short stories with me, and like any serious reader I have countless of unfinished novels on my bookshelf. As long as the writing is good I am willing to read (almost) everything, fiction and non-fiction alike. 

Like any creative process, inspiration comes in bursts, but I have—perhaps stupidly—convinced myself that the stories and characters I create deserve a lasting cameo in print. Winston Churchill allegedly said that success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. This is good advice for authors. Failure, frustration and fatigue are guaranteed in writing, and success is nothing but a dim and distant opportunity. My best advice is to write first, and ask questions later. No one writes a Booker Prize winner in the first go. In fact, most authors don't get to write one of those at all! 

I have tweaked the way I present my fiction here on on the site, by creating a new page through which you can buy my work. At the moment, I am only able to take Paypal payments, but I am fiddling with an addition for standard credit card payments too. The old sample page, with links to my Amazon page, is gone and so is the separate blog I created for my thoughts and ideas on fiction. I hardly used it. In any case, I’ll be using the main blog for updates from on. The main shift is that I have effectively chosen to internalise the distribution and selling channel for my work. 

Using content on the site

All the content on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons License unless otherwise stated, for example in the case of my non-fiction essays, some of which are copyrighted. I am pretty relaxed, however, so if you want to use this content, just ask. If ever I need to upload or link to walled content, I will give fair warning. Data for charts are sourced from FRED, OECD, Eurostat, IMF, BIS, Market Watch, Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, Investing.com, Quandl or Bloomberg unless otherwise stated. Please feel free to share the content if you think you need to. In principle, I have no problem with third-party providers grabbing my content and using on their own site, but please link back, and say where you got it. You will also notice that I have no ads. I plan to keep it that way. 

Last updated: August 2023.