The UK and Australia may soon press ahead with world-first digital taxes on the appropriation of user data for advertising and other services by tech giants such as Google and social media platforms like Facebook. These moves come as France’s own advertising tax on those companies begin to take effect. And, certainly, they feed into […]
This week CapX is republishing some of our favourite articles of the year. This piece first appeared on June 21. What is it about the European Union and bad tech laws with boring names? Brussels managed to transform four harmless letters into a byword for irritating compliance-induced spam and pop ups as well as a consolidation […]
This week, the government announced that they were suspending the Tier 1 Investor visa scheme over money-laundering concerns. Known informally as the “golden visa”, foreigners who invest £2 million in the UK gain the right to live and work here and can apply for permanent residency after five years (or sooner if they invest more). […]
These are good times for absurd ideas. In a new report commissioned by Rebecca Long-Bailey, the shadow business secretary, and John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, Prem Sikka — an Emeritus Professor of Accounting at Sheffield — makes a series of suggestions about who should decide upon executive pay and how. It includes talk of the […]
For years, bien pensants were saying that what Britain really needs is an energy strategy. Now we have not only an energy strategy but an industrial strategy as well, and we can see it’s a busted flush. The recent decision by Toshiba to liquidate its interest in the Moorside nuclear project shows that having governments, rather than markets, picking […]
Think of Davos. Now imagine the annual international powwow not in 2018 but 400 years earlier. The question on the lips of “Chinese scholars in their silk robes, British adventurers in their doublets and jerkins, Turkish civil servants in their turban and caftans” once they reach the Swiss town is a big one: “Who will […]
Philip Hammond’s decision in this week’s budget to abandon the Private Finance Initiative has been regarded by some commentators as the adoption of a “Corbyn-lite” policy by the Conservatives. Such a claim misses the point. After all, PFI has been used to fund a huge expansion in government spending whilst pushing the costs, in an […]
This is a story about corporate and investor strategy, government meddling, and chocolate. (Cue Homer Simpson…) It involves the Hershey Company, the pioneering US chocolate maker. Typically, Hershey is the top seller of candy in the United States—but it is not the largest US candy maker. That distinction goes to its bitter rival, Mars Inc., […]
Oxfam thinks that Singapore is an unsuccessful economy – ranking it 149th out of 157 countries – because it has inequality. Singapore thinks that turning a fetid swamp into one of the world’s richest countries in only 80 years looks a lot like a success story. You will, of course, picks sides in this debate. […]
According to conventional wisdom, Theresa May is on the back foot. But this needn’t be the case. The modern world gets more exciting by the day and a Prime Minister that grasps the opportunities afforded to her by these changes could usher in greater prosperity for Britain. Mrs May’s predecessors understood this. In the 1980s […]
Today marks an ignominious anniversary. It is ten years since Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, precipitating chaos on global financial markets and a decade of economic and social upheaval. Ten years on, those of us who defend economic liberty are still on the back foot. Financial services, in particular have a serious image problem. As […]
Over the past several decades, technology has changed in a way which only recently would have been unimaginable. Put simply, we live in a time of constant and seismic technological change. In 2050, the way we live will be completely shaped by the inventions and breakthroughs made today. Spearheading this technological charge is the Life […]
In the turbulent history of American banking, one institution looms larger than the rest. Take a momentous event in US history — the end of slavery, the country’s breakneck industrialisation, its infatuation with the stock market in the 1920s, and the recent mortgage meltdown — and chances are that two-hundred-year-old Citi was involved: sometimes bankrolling […]
Over the last 20 years, has the world’s extreme poverty rate a) almost doubled b) stayed the same or c) almost halved? CapX readers will, of course, know that the right answer is c. But when asked that question recently, just 9 per cent of Brits answered correctly. Yet defending the market is not just […]
Last night, I appeared on Newsnight to discuss the renationalisation of the water industry. It was a depressing experience, because my debating partner – from the trade union think tank CLASS – seemed utterly impervious to anything resembling the facts. In particular, there is a weird tendency on the left to assume that we free-market […]
If there is one thing that the Cambridge Analytica scandal taught us, it’s that politicians are mostly clueless about the political implications tech and social media bring about for society. What went largely unreported is that they also don’t have much of an idea about the economic transformation behind Facebook’s success in establishing a business […]
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