Ionuț Bălan

Economist and journalist, publisher at Blogu' lui Balan, partizan of market freedom and business ethos, passionate about arts and culture

Babson’s Early Warning: Reassessing a Neglected Voice in the History of Economic Thought

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No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The Great Depression of the 1930s is often portrayed as an event that caught the economic and financial establishment entirely by surprise. Yet Roger Ward Babson – frequently described as a precursor to contemporary crisis forecasters such as Nouriel Roubini – issued a remarkably explicit warning on 5 September 1929, at the National Business Conference. He cautioned that a “crash” was imminent, pointing to factory closures, rising unemployment, and “a serious decline in business activity.” His intervention came at a moment when Irving Fisher, the distinguished Yale economist whose name is associated with the Fisher equation, the Fisher theorem, and the Fisher effect, continued to argue that although stock prices might undergo some downward adjustment, nothing “in the nature of a crash” was foreseeable. Even on 21 October 1929, just days before the dramatic collapse, Fisher referred merely to “a slight shake‑out in some of the more marginal circles of the stock market.” More

Why Goethe Should Have Won the Nobel Prize in Economics

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No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 A long-standing prejudice in modern and contemporary thought holds – sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly – that economics is one thing, while life, society, culture and everything else are quite another. In other words, to look at human existence through an economic lens is to confine it to measurable, arithmetic, “accounting” aspects that supposedly reveal nothing but the “greed” that drives people toward “profit.” More

When Consensus Becomes Systemic Risk: Mark Twain and the Failure of Experts

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No. 59, May-Jun. 2026 Financial crises are often explained as failures of markets, regulation, or monetary policy. More often than not, however, they begin as failures of judgment. That may sound obvious. Yet modern societies continue to place extraordinary faith in expert opinion, particularly when uncertainty is high. Investors seek forecasts. Governments seek guidance. Central banks seek credibility. The assumption is that more expertise leads to better decisions. More

Blue-Blooded Red Ideologue

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No. 59, May-Jun. 2026 I had a laugh with a friend the other day, wondering how many Labour peers there are in the House of Lords. We rather naively assumed there weren’t any. When we checked, we were stunned: the answer is 225 members of the House. More

Why We Don’t Have Memorable Characters Like Hercule Poirot?

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No. 58, Mar.-Apr. 2026 “Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who became internationally famous, has died in England. His age was unknown. Mr. Poirot achieved fame as a private investigator after he retired as a member of the Belgian police force in 1904. His career, as chronicled in the novels of Dame Agatha Christie, his creator, was one of the most illustrious in fiction. At the end of his life, he was arthritic and had a bad heart. He was in a wheelchair often, and was carried from his bedroom to the public lounge at Styles Court, a nursing home in Essex, wearing a wig and false moustaches to mask the signs of age that offended his vanity. In his active days, he was always impeccably dressed. Mr. Poirot, who was just 5 feet 4 inches tall, went to England from Belgium during World War I as a refugee. He settled in a little town not far from Styles, then an elaborate country estate, where he took on his first private case.” More

Why the Intelligentsia’s Drift to the Left Ends in a Shipwreck

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No. 58, Mar.-Apr. 2026 I am referring to the intellectuals who made their political début as more or less notorious dissidents before the Romanian Revolution and were fully acclaimed as such during the ’90s and early 2000s. Many became flagbearers of the “anti-corruption battle” in the recent years, alongside with their disciples. When asked for their stance, they all declare themselves “rightists” or at least reject the “leftist” political option, after the criminal experiment of the Communist totalitarianism. More

Bucharest – A Guide to Streets with “Healthy” Proletarian Origins

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No. 57, Jan.-Feb. 2026 What do street names have to do with the way Romanians understand capitalism today? More than one might expect. Long before textbooks, statistics, or political slogans, streets were the first public lesson in how an economy works. They recorded who built, who traded, who took risks, who invested, who created value. More

2026 Begins with a Lag

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No. 57, Jan.-Feb. 2026 This is not an illusion; it pertains to the mechanisms of the economy. The effects of political and fiscal decisions do not play out instantaneously. A significant share of the measures adopted in 2025 lead to a tighter economic framework, raise costs, compress margins, and deepen uncertainty. But their real effects have not yet fully manifested into the economy. They are still working their way through the system. This is because they are not transmitted directly; instead, they are filtered through people’s expectations. And people, more often than not, do not react immediately. Decisions are not made at the moment when the impulse is released, but rather later, when the signal has settled and caution turns into behaviour. More

Colonies and Freedom: Why Some Flourish and Others Fail

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No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 A brief scrutiny into the living conditions of former colonial nations reveals a perplexing motif: today, nations that abound in resources prized in the past lag behind initially agrarian countries that showed little promise. Economists Kenneth Sokoloff and Stanley Engerman find such contrasts between British offshoots like Jamaica and the United States and French settlements like Canada and Haiti. Even Argentina, whose name captures the original belief that it was lush with silver, was relatively barren compared to its Spanish neighbours, which are presently less developed. The two economists surmount this paradox by observing that regions with a high and immediate productive potential – where, for example, coffee and sugar cane plantations were instituted – are also the places where the highest inequality installed. A thin elite, formed predominantly of settlers, that was solely interested in exporting the harvested commodities back home, concentrated almost the entirety of wealth, with little distribution to lower echelons. This class perpetuated its privileges by shaping institutional arrangements to its advantage, holding to the reins of power and prohibiting cultivators from owning property or selling produce, without conceding any rights. While regimes periodically changed, and elites were replaced, the practices of predecessors continued as new rulers faced little pressure to conduct reforms, leading to inequality that remained puzzlingly persistent up to recent times. More

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