Angela Merkel appears odds-on to return to power as Germans go to the polls on 24 September, either in coalition with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) or in a “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats (SPD). The SPD remains the largest challenger to Merkel’s dominance, but it is struggling to lay a glove on a respected opponent. […]
The 2007-8 financial crisis had lots of causes. But one crucial problem was that banks’ errors were correlated: nearly all of them made the same bets, and they bet big. So you’d think that regulatory policy, now in the hands of the Bank of England, would steer clear of anything that made that problem worse, by encouraging […]
While the country was consumed with the Charlottesville debacle last week, President Trump was busy reigniting his PR campaign against an American retail staple: Amazon. In a tweet composed last Wednesday, Trump said: “Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs […]
A decade on from the financial crisis, the reports today about the sub-prime lender Provident Financial have given us a nasty case of déjà vu. Within the space of a year, its loan repayment rates have fallen from 90 per cent to 57 per cent – leading to profit warnings, the departure of its chief […]
Imagine that you are the head of a firm, and one of your senior executives marches proudly into your office. “Boss, I’ve come up with a way of increasing our profits and market share by a significant amount,” he says proudly. “But I’ve decided not to do it, because it would be bad for our […]
Business is “on the brink of distrust”, declared Edelman’s Barometer earlier this year. It is both telling and alarming that trust in all four institutions – government, media, business and NGOs – has deteriorated in 2017 from 2016. This trend reversal is significant given that we’ve witnessed a major rebound of trust following the financial […]
I don’t watch the news or Question Time, because the pontifications of various political and comedic celebrities won’t shift my vote; also, in middle age, I prefer to manage my blood pressure carefully. That latter reason also sends me circuit training at a Russell Square gym three or four mornings a week, where I’ve found, […]
The publication of Matthew Taylor’s employment review today has re-opened the debate on the “gig” or “sharing” economy. Trade unions, politicians and commentators seem to see these platform technologies as a troublesome challenge, given they do not conform to existing business models on which employment legislation has been predicated. But, dear readers, that is the whole […]
There are two theories about the rise and fall of Travis Kalanick. The first is that he was a great man, but not a good one. The second is that he was neither great, nor good, just lucky – that Uber was such a good idea, so perfectly of its time, that it didn’t much […]
Jeremy Corbyn’s economic ideas, as I have explained previously, owe a great deal to the intellectual battles fought between the British Left and Right during the 1970s and the 1980s. Corbyn, alas, is not the only leftist whose ideas are firmly stuck in the past. On the other side of the Atlantic, the US Left […]
Given the scale of Britain’s political woes, a new European Commission proposal on financial stability and systemic risk may seem the least of its troubles. However the EU’s attempt to exert control on the “euro clearing” trade isn’t merely an arcane argument about money, or regulation. It’s a case study in the limits of government’s ability […]
Whoever wins on Thursday, Britain is going to get increased employment regulation. It could be via Theresa May’s proposals for extended care leave, restrictions on zero-hours arrangements, putting workers on boards, forcing firms to report on ethnic pay gaps and maintaining European employment regulations post-Brexit. Or it could be Jeremy Corbyn’s outright ban on non-traditional […]
A fundamental change is underway in stock market investing, and the spin-off effects are poised to dramatically impact corporate America. In the past, individuals and large institutions mostly invested in actively managed mutual funds, such as Fidelity, in which fund managers pick stocks with the aim of beating the market. But since the financial crisis […]
The EU has once again got itself tied up in one of those gloriously French snits concerning economics. Various of the Enarques, politicians and bureaucrats – if there is a meaningful distinction between the three in France – insist that once the UK leaves the EU, euro clearing will have to leave London. Their preference, of course, is for […]
Around 250 years ago, Britain launched the world’s first Industrial Revolution, powered by steam and innovations like the spinning jenny. This dramatically improved the efficiency of the textiles sector, and started the process of mechanisation and automation that soon attracted opposition from the Luddites, a group of English weavers and textile workers who destroyed machinery […]
CEO pay packages are just dreadful, MPs tell us today, and must, therefore, be changed. Given that MPs are more intelligent, better educated, have more information, and are generally just more perfectly formed than the rest of us, we must do as they say, of course. We know that MPs are all of these things […]
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