John Kay

Trust was a real competitive advantage for mutual businesses. But the difficulty of meeting the conflicting expectations of different users and the slow adaptation to the requirements of changing technology explains why mutuality ceased to be a viable basis for stock exchanges.
However, if mutuality is not the answer to customers’ requirements for providers they can trust, the industry badly needs to find other answers.

The states of Western Europe are the first states in history in which insiders represent a large proportion of the population. So every presentation of the reform agenda simply provokes the opposition of the majority and the victims are those who can never hope to become insiders.

The battle for the London Stock Exchange has all the structure of a Jane Austen novel. Miss L.S.E., – a great name and the inheritor of a great tradition. It wouldn’t be the first time though that a suitor has to pay a high price for little more than a grand title. But such purchasers often do not regret their choice.

The principal reason why careful, sometimes even rigorous, scrutiny of foreign takeovers is prudent rather than protectionist is that what happens at headquarters matters.

The disappearance of P & O is a milestone in business organisation – it symbolises the arrival of capitalism without capital

Merger Monday has proved that in the merger market, hope springs eternal. The wall of money chasing alternative investments in hope of the returns achieved in the heady 1990s, made it possible to take almost any company private.

The tunnel under the English Channel failed to fire public imagination. After years of debt refinancing and changes in management, the central problem remains that no one really owns the tunnel project. Now, the debt has wandered into the hands of hedge funds, whose principal interest is not close and efficient transport links between Britain and the rest of Europe.

Investors and companies have become closer in the past two decades, but in a dysfunctional way. This tends to lead to destructive short-termism, and there hardly is a more topical example of this than Marks and Spencer.

Because no rule or code can define the character of a non-executive, even boards compliant with every code and regulation will range from the effective to the useless. Shareholders should keep an eye on excessive remuneration and vainglorious acquisitions, and intervene in issues of management succession when it appears that non-executive directors have become too close to the company to do a proper job.

The invisible hand is the most widely used metaphor in economics. What did Adam Smith (or William Shakespeare, who coined the phrase) really mean?