CFA | LIAM HALLIGAN

I’m off to Poland today. Why? The reason is that I write for, help to run and own a stake in a media company called bne-Intellinews – which specialises in business, economic and political news from Central and Eastern Europe, CIS, Turkey and North Africa.

bne-Intellinews was formed after some friends and I got together and merged Business New Europe – a magazine/website founded in 2006 by highly-respected British journalist Ben Aris – with IntelliNews – a specialised financial news/data outfit owned by Jim Hammond, an American publisher formerly with Euromoney.

Aren’t financial assets “simply pumped up by printed money?” Don’t share prices “need to adjust downward by something like 50pc?” Is it “really the case that if Greece leaves monetary union, other countries won’t follow?” It must “surely be wrong to try solving a debt problem by taking on even more debt?”

These are extremely direct, uncompromising questions. They sound like they were posed by some kind of renegade economist. To talk of financial markets being “very stretched”, to accuse Western policy-makers of “colossal intellectual failure”, or state that quantitative easing is “just buying time, creating zombie banks and companies” is to be widely dismissed as rash – and I should know.