Tag: Concentration
The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper
The dispersion of productivity among already rich countries has increased. Norway and Switzerland have surged ahead but laggards such as Italy – and indeed Britain – have struggled to keep up with the pack.
The world must learn to deal with the reality of failure
Having invented the concept of GSifi to describe too-big-to-fail banks, the world’s financial regulators are on the hunt for other businesses which can be treated in a similar way.
Take on Wall St titans if you want reform
Effective banking reform should aim at structures, not at intensified supervision. Resilient systems are simple ones.
Radical innovation rarely comes from within
The dynamism of a market economy comes from innovation in products and processes, and radical innovation in products and processes often – in fact usually – comes from outside the existing market structure.
Powerful interests are trying to control the market
A stance which is pro-business must be distinguished from a stance which is pro-market. In the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that distinction has not been appreciated well enough.
Narrow Banking
The Reform of Banking Regulation
We should spend less time trying to ensure that our regulators can regulate financial behemoths with turnovers bigger than the...
Too big to fail? Wall Street, we have a problem
We should learn lessons from the Apollo programme and the people who design our television sets. Modular constructions are more robust.
Tax havens exist because of the hypocrisy of larger states
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
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.
Some companies are too powerful to fail
Few things corrode business efficiency and effective markets more insidiously than the discovery that it is more profitable to win the favour of politicians than to win the approval of customers.