John Kay

By the time Stephen Byers could slip from one cabinet post to another without taking responsibility for any of the blunders that seemed to happen wherever he was in charge, ministerial accountability had been replaced by T.S. Eliot’s cat: “When a crime’s discovered, then Macavity’s not there.”

It is more effective to give incentives to serve consumers well than to supervise the way in which they are served.

On the 22nd June the Secretary of State for Business, Vince Cable, announced a review that will  examine investment in UK equity markets and its impact on the long-term performance and governance of UK quoted companies. John will lead the review, supported by an expert panel. 
He said,  “Equity markets are a principal mechanism of control and [...]

Failure is intrinsic to the market economy: but the legitimacy of capitalism depends in part on how it deals with the consequences of such failure.

Crime often depends on a state of mind. An individual can be dishonest, or intend to kill. But to attribute these characteristics to a business, as distinct from the individuals in a business, is a metaphor too far.

Market economies are always vulnerable to chancers and spivs who sell overpriced goods to ill-informed customers and seem to promise things they do not intend to deliver.

So does tentative adolescence give way to independent adulthood? The likely SNP victory does not alter the fact there is no majority in Scotland for independence and little chance of one.

A small fraction of the ingenuity devoted to the construction of complex financial instruments that no one should want could advantageously be applied to the construction of less complex instruments that meet the needs of the Big Society.

From the start, PFI conflated the desirable aim of exploiting private sector management skills in project supervision with the undesirable aim of obscuring public finances with complex funding structures. It created an industry of advisers with a vested interest in its own expansion.

The financial world used to have a diversity of corporate organisational forms – listed company partnership, mutual. Most partnerships and mutuals became listed companies, a change that was not usually for the better.