News reaches us that a number of bankrupts – Scottish businessmen apparently – are fiddling the system. If true, then this is extremely serious: bankruptcy is the most important part of our economic system. Since we humans are prone to making mistakes, all of our economic systems are at risk. So we need a tool […]
Free market economics hasn’t been faring well lately, or so it might seem. Donald Trump rode to the American presidency in part with an attack on free trade, including the synergistic and successful North America Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). Much has been made of a 2016 Harvard poll that purported to show that young Americans […]
Anne Perkins manages that rarity in The Guardian: a piece with a headline which is true. She complains that Ryanair isn’t just an airline, “it’s a parable for our greedy times”. And indeed it is. Although not quite in the way she thinks, of course. Her complaint is largely twofold, firstly, that we get treated like […]
Monopolies are a very real economic and political problem. That much is uncontroversial. The difficult question is what to do about them. And the answer varies depending on whether we are dealing with fast-moving new technology, or a more established industry. Unfortunately, that distinction is lost on most people at the moment. Consider Google, which […]
Contrary to what the doom-mongers say, Brexit provides the UK with an opportunity to grow its financial services industry. London retained its title this year as the number one financial centre in the world. According to the Global Financial Services Index, the next European competitor, which is placed ninth behind New York, is Zurich. And […]
It is often said that the best and brightest don’t seek elected or public office because the pecuniary reward is pitiful compared to what their brains can fetch in the private sector. They instead join investment banks and consulting firms, whose output we are told is “socially useless” and away from which we are desperately […]
The joint BEIS and Work and Pensions Committees’ report into the Taylor Review of the gig economy, which is published today, is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. Too often the gig economy is associated in the public’s mind with the idea of low-paid, insecure work that exploits the vulnerable. This is certainly the caricature that […]
If you’re trying to explain Britain’s sky-high employment rate, a good place to start is the OECD’s statistics on business creation. The UK, it turns out, creates more “employer enterprises” (ie firms that actually hire people other than their owners) than pretty much any of its European rivals. But there’s a problem. As Rishi Sunak […]
John Kay was born a year before Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. In the latest episode of Free Exchange, the CapX podcast, he tells Robert Colvile that “sometimes I look at Corbyn and I think, he thinks what I thought when I was 17. It’s just that I’ve learnt a bit since then and he hasn’t.” […]
Nobel laureate Robert Shiller has written about the need for economists to take greater account of narrative in their analyses. The stories that people tell themselves and each other, whether or not in fact true, not only shape the understanding by future generations of economic events – consider the Great Depression, or 1970s stagflation – […]
What do the companies in these three groups have in common? Group A: American Motors, Brown Shoe, Studebaker, Collins Radio, Detroit Steel, Zenith Electronics and National Sugar Refining. Group B: Boeing, Campbell Soup, Colgate-Palmolive, Deere, General Motors, IBM, Kellogg, Procter and Gamble, and Whirlpool. Group C: Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Home Depot, Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Office […]
The contrast could not have been starker. Last Monday, the Institute for Free Trade launched its first Global Trade Summit at the Mercer’s Hall in the City of London. The event was positively brimming over with enthusiastic Brexit backers, save for the reporter from the Financial Times and some, but not all, of the assembled […]
Amazon is casting around for a US city to house its second headquarters. Various places are falling over themselves to win Amazon’s business, offering property tax rebates, low cost loans and special breaks on this and that. One city has even announced that it would change its name to Amazon were it to win. But […]
Jeremy Corbyn opened his speech to the Labour Party conference – after the chants of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” had finally, finally died down – with a genuinely moving story. He told the audience about Margaret Bondfield, a 19th-century teenage shop assistant from Brighton who was so shocked by the working conditions she saw around her […]
Anne Perkins manages that rarity in The Guardian: a piece with a headline which is true. She complains that Ryanair isn’t just an airline, “it’s a parable for our greedy times”. And indeed it is. Although not quite in the way she thinks, of course. Her complaint is largely twofold, firstly, that we get treated like […]
Every day, Google is used for billions of searches, making it the most popular search engine on earth. On Monday, 11 September, it appealed an EU decision which resulted in a $2.9 billion fine because the company firmly believes that its actions were neither anti-competitive nor harmful to consumers. Essentially, EU regulators punished Google because its improvements make its […]
Watch or listen to CapX’s weekly podcast ‘The Capitalist’ wherever you get your podcasts.
