I am now the employer of my favourite musician. Well, kind of. I have signed up for Patreon, and am funding singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer, with $10 gifts every time she releases a new piece of content. I am one of (currently) 4809 patrons, all signed up for different amounts, meaning that Amanda gets paid $31,838.54 for […]
Doubtless you have heard of Uber, the online taxi-hailing service. Most likely you have heard of Airbnb. And Snapchat? Probably. Dropbox? Very likely. Spotify? Of course you have. Even if you haven’t used them yet they are sitting there on your smartphone, just waiting for the day when you suddenly find that you want whatever it […]
Imagine the emotional exhilaration of the victors as the defeated Germans signed the Treaty of Versailles which ended World War One – “the war to end all wars”. The victors’ indisputable sense of just retribution was meant to send a message for the ages. Unfortunately, for all concerned, that age was very short. Just a quarter […]
Giant corporations are one aspect of modern capitalism that has come in for a lot of criticism in recent years. Detached from nation states, they are seen to be indifferent to concepts like job security and fair taxation. Detached from competition and accountability, they neglect customer service and allow executive pay to break the stratosphere. Big business is, […]
Irwin Stelzer has a superb essay in the latest Weekly Standard. The American system of market-based capitalism is in trouble, he says. The reason? It is not so much that there was a financial crisis followed by a deep recession, or even that there is public resentment at the rise of a new super-rich elite […]
It has been more than 25 years since a British Prime Minister or a Chancellor felt the need to make the vigorous, moral case for the profit motive. Faced with public anger over the role banking excesses played in the financial crash, even Conservative leaders have abandoned the P-word and replaced it with nebulous phrases such […]
If all goes according to plan, the next few weeks or months should see many if not most of us made measurably poorer. It’s nothing to do with taxes, crashes, or meltdowns. It’s nothing to do with politics. It’s something that will happen as a result of a well-established routine run by investment banks, financial […]
They are packing their bags. The nomadic tribes of capitalism – mostly based in London – who have relied on Britain as a base for hundreds of years are looking on the UK political situation with growing alarm. That is the significance of HSBC’s announcement that it is conducting an immediate review of its domicile. […]
This is the weekly newsletter from Iain Martin, editor of CapX. To receive it by email every Friday, along with a short daily email of our top five stories, please subscribe here. The “rock star” Greek finance minister continued his world tour this week, with a visit to Washington. He got twelve minutes with President […]
It’s hardly big news that household debt is often bad (I’m one of the millions of Brits who’ve been sucked in by its empty promises, to my deep regret). But not all credit offered to people on low incomes is bad — especially when their source of credit is their own savings, pooled with those […]
Ferdinando Giugliano, an Oxford graduate and journalist at the Financial Times, perfectly represents the ‘Italian emigrant’ today. The majority of Italians who left their country – 94,000 in 2013 alone and 300,000 in the past decade – are in fact male (56%), aged between 18 and 34 years old, and highly educated. “Italy is basically losing big chunks […]
The Hypo Alpe Adria scandal, which threatens to bankrupt the Austrian province of Carinthia, started about two decades ago. Back in 1992 the small provincial bank had a balance sheet total of ÖS 26 billion (Austrian schillings), equivalent to €1.89bn, but was about to become a major player in the Balkans thanks to the burning […]
Last week the Shanghai Composite Index reached its highest level since 2008. The rail sector in particular was a strong driver of growth, buoyed by recent discussion of a potential merger between China Railway Group Co and China Railway Construction Corp, the two largest train and rail equipment makers. More generally, the gains reflect a concrete […]
Ask people on the street what mental image they associate with the words “stock exchange,” and you’ll likely hear about a large imposing building in the middle of New York or Chicago. Inside the building there is a huge space crowded with traders in multicolored jackets screaming and gesticulating to each other. Until ten years […]
What does a business do with the profit it makes? Toss it in the air and dance beneath it? Stash it away in offshore accounts? Transfer it all to the boss’s pay packet? There are plenty of people who think this is exactly what happens. They’re the people who spit the word profit, who consider […]
He was booed at the Paralympic Games – in front of his children – but his economic record is now the Conservative Party’s biggest electoral asset. He promised austerity but repeatedly missed deficit targets and has presided over a massive increase in government indebtedness. He defended Plan A against allcomers but pursued a semi-Keynesian Plan […]
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