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If you are heading for the door, you might as well pick up whatever money is left on the table. This seemed to be the maxim at Enron. New Statesman, 10.6.03	Britain has sunk itself deep into a fiscal black hole (Financial Times 01 July 2009) In practice, the only successful method of reducing public spending as a share of GDP has been to impose tight curbs while the economy is growing rapidly. We shall be lucky if such an opportunity appears. How to stay safe when doing-it-yourself (Financial Times 27 June 2009) The return on your portfolio is the aggregate of the returns on individual securities: the risk on your portfolio is not the aggregate of the risk of individual securities. With the aid of diversification you can earn more return with less risk. Why every 2 per cent makes a difference to your pension (Financial Times 20 June 2009) Having seen off the taxman, you must see off the sharks of the financial services industry. When consensus does not really mean agreement (Financial Times 05 January 1998) Just as universities need to tell people to stop quibbling and work towards a common objective, companies need to realise that clustering around a corporate conventional wisdom that has not been subject to analysis and debate is also not a recipe for success. How a television monopoly ended in mediocrity (Financial Times 24 June 2009) A licence-fee-based BBC was the guarantor of quality television in a monopoly market. But a licence-fee-based BBC is now the main obstacle to quality television in a competitive market. The slow drip of the ‘faster’ payments system (Financial Times 17 June 2009) Regulatory agencies often come to see their functions through the eyes of those they regulate. The label for this process is regulatory capture. Beauty in markets is best judged by the beholder (Financial Times 10 June 2009) Once loans can be bought and sold, what matters is not their soundness but their price – with the predictable consequences of instability and price fluctuations far in excess of any reasonable assessment of underlying change in fundamental value. Salutary lessons from the downfall of a carmaker (Financial Times 03 June 2009) The decline of GM is as instructive as its rise. The challenge of how to reconcile professional management with a culture of innovation remains for ever a central issue for management thinkers. Why ‘too big to fail’ is too much for us to take (Financial Times 27 May 2009) Liberal democracies of the modern world based on lightly regulated capitalism acknowledge two mechanisms of accountability – the marketplace and the ballot box. Beware bail-out kings and backbench barons (Financial Times 20 May 2009) Power is a duty, not a prize, is probably the most important reason why some countries in the world are rich and others poor. The point needs to be brought home in equal measure to legislators, chief executives and bankers. Expenses have caught MPs with their pants down (Financial Times 13 May 2009) Values of integrity, of public service, and of responsible stewardship of the money of others can never be replaced by rules or imposed by regulation. A boom based on little more than a bezzle (Financial Times 06 May 2009) When the future arrived in 2007, we learnt that others had febezzled from us on a massive scale. And that we had also febezzled from ourselves. Box-tickers should not be the ones making decisions (Financial Times 29 April 2009) Typically reasons given for judgment are rationalisations after the event, the consultation is a formality rather than a sincere search for opinions, and the accountability is a matter of extensive paperwork rather than a genuine appraisal of performance. Labour’s affair with bankers is to blame for this sorry state (Financial Times 25 April 2009) The crippling consequence of inability to admit error is the impossibility of learning from past mistakes. How economics lost sight of real world (Financial Times 22 April 2009) There is not, and never will be, an economic theory of everything. We should observe empirical regularities and we will often find pragmatic solutions that work even though our understanding of why they work is incomplete. History vindicates the science of muddling through (Financial Times 15 March 2009) The practical man must build out, step-by-step from the current situation – the science of muddling through. Do not depend on Otherland to apply the rules (Financial Times 08 April 2009) The best answer would be more Europe – an effective pan-European regulator and a single Europe-wide scheme for protecting depositors. From the fat cats to long tails: when all is not normal (Financial Times 01 April 2009) To choose appropriate models you need to understand both the maths and the business environment. Media industries and financial institutions have both been unsuccessful in marrying these two skills. The fallacy of equating economic power with clout (Financial Times 25 March 2009) Dominance of an industry or activity is not the same as scale. International trade is conducted by individuals and businesses, not governments, and it is them, who negotiate the division of the value added trade creates. Tax havens exist because of the hypocrisy of larger states (Financial Times 21 March 2009) Havens exist only because larger states allow them to exist, and larger states allow them to exist because the customers of havens are the rich and powerful. How the ‘Madoff twist’ entices the astute (Financial Times 18 March 2009) The major beneficiaries of investment banking in the past decade have not been the customers of investment banks, or even investment banks themselves, but the investment bankers. Lessons from a 1930s rebound that petered out (Financial Times 11 March 2009) Our capacity to learn from the Great Depression is limited because we do not know how economies would have evolved after 1938 if politics had not supervened. How the competent bankers can be assisted (Financial Times 04 March 2009) No one wants bank managers to be replaced by civil servants. But there are a lot of perfectly competent bank managers out there, even if there are a lot of incompetent bank executives. Greenspan could have found cure at pharmacy (Financial Times 25 February 2009) We trust the pharmacist not because we bank on his or her self-interest, but because we are confident that it will be tightly restrained. In part, we rely on the long-run self-interest of the pharmacist in protecting his or her own reputation. Introduce professional standards for bankers (Financial Times 18 February 2009) It is true that professional reputations are not what they once were, that self-regulation of standards of competence has often been inadequate, that professions’ ethical standards have declined generally. But it is also striking that such decline is most noticeable in the areas of law and accountancy closest to financial services. ^ back to top
what's this? © John Kay 2009