Tim Gwynn Jones

🔊Kevin Warsh - Powell 2.0 or Trump's Arthur Burns?

I talk to three “watchers” – Claire Jones, Michael Redmond and Catarina Saraiva - about what to expect from the Fed's greatest chameleon.

Pick a side, and lead it

Britain doesn't need to rejoin the EU to return to Europe. The next Labour leader should choose a quicker, safer and more strategically relevant way back.

A hawk's education

Klaas Knot - profile of a frontrunner to be the next ECB president

Enough

Europe must seize this moment to resist Donald Trump because he’s weak and has never been weaker. Push back this time and he’ll fall over.

🔊The Chair

Podcast profiles of Marriner Eccles, Bill Martin, Arthur Burns, Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and Jerome Powell.

Maybe this time

Reckless political predictions for 2026

🔊Hungary - podcast series

To market-test demand for a weekly podcast on European electoral politics, the Twenty-Four Two Podcast ran a weekly series on Hungary between January and April. It worked so there will be a weekly series before the big one (France) in 2027 but we will also cover coming national elections in Sweden, Spain, Poland, Italy and Bosnia as well as the EU referendum in Iceland and state votes in eastern Germany.

"ECB watching"

ECB reports since 2021 - to access, mail tim@242.news

🔊"They were not sympathetic with fascism but they were accepting it"

Over the past decade, US policy experts have had reasons to ask: should “good” people work for authoritarians? Does their implicit endorsement do more harm than standing down to be replaced by someone potentially worse? A century ago, this was a central question for Italy’s governing class as Benito Mussolini’s fascist movement seized and consolidated power. First among these good people was Alberto Beneduce, an anti-fascist socialist.

Tell me lies ...

Outside Trumpwelt, true political “genius” is the ability and will to identify a painful necessity, convince enough people of the requirement for change, and then execute it through democratic means.

... Tell me sweet little lies

Explaining the realities of persistent deficits, snowballing debt, pension sustainability and intergenerational fairness to the French will be more difficult than telling them what they want to hear. But that should be why people aspire to high office.

🔊"The next crisis could be bigger than the last"

John Cochrane, Luis Garicano and Klaus Masuch on how to build resilience into the euro

🔊Medley Advisors podcasts

I produced and hosted these fortnightly podcasts on markets, policy, and politics, which ran until April 2026.

De-Niall

Trump lacks the self-discipline to be a true fascist but he long ago moved beyond Bryanism into something that threatens both Republic and Empire. I believe the writer of some of our most thought-provoking recent histories can see this. He just can’t bear to disappoint his friends or comfort his enemies.

The 242.news reading list

From 2020-25, every time I interviewed authors for the New Books Network, I asked them to recommend two books. For some, two was too many; for others, not enough. It turned into this monster.

Interviewer interviewed

Caleb Zakarin talks to me about 'The Chair'

🔊In The Room

Born out of a world war, the European communities/union grew through successive crises. In this series, I talk to behind-the-scenes officials who were In The Room as Europe evolved from a club of nations into a union.

European Voice

I wrote a lot of copy for European Voice (most of it from 1995-2000 - and some of it pretty good) that Politico has inexplicably archived.

Europe gets tough on antitrust

Long-form profile of Mario Monti - recently unearthed from 2001

📖 Euro Essentials 📖

In the summer of 1998, I spent two weeks writing a handbook for The Economist on the euro, which was due to be launched a few months later. Here's the whole thing.

🤔 Tim G. Jones