Yearly Archives: 2007
How private equity revamped a London high street
Christmas shopping in Marylebone High Street provides insight into the internalisation of externalities and the relationship between corporate governance and business strategy.
How to safeguard savers in a banking crisis
The Northern Rock debacle could, and should, have been avoided through the deposit protection and special administration mechanisms that are found in most other countries.
Rock’s fate should not be a game of chicken
The chicken game, which frequently ends in tragedy or folly, is a game for movie-going teenagers, not grown-ups.
Climate change: the (Groucho) Marxist approach
The balance between present and future will be determined not by moral philosophy or economic models but by the decisions of ordinary savers, investors and voters.
Emerging economies have not become ‘decoupled’
Your country of residence is where you buy your clothes, eat your meals, draw up your accounts and write your board minutes. But the volume and value of all these domestic operations depends on the role the country’s producers play in the global economy.
Words of comfort for the grieving investor
Perhaps the most difficult of investment lessons is that inaction is often the best action.
The capital gains tax change will not deter enterprise
If very rich people are to pay much lower tax rates than the doctors who care for them or the teachers who made their careers possible, there needs to be a compelling demonstration of widespread economic benefits.
Research that aids publicists but not the public
Academics and think-tanks need to be reminded that generating publicity is not a legitimate research objective. The study of business is afflicted by confusion between the results of a survey of what people think about the world and a survey of what the world is really like.
We should turn the clocks forward, not back
An adult with normal habits who lives far from the equator will usually be asleep during several hundred daylight hours, almost all of these in the morning.
The fruitless search for exact knowledge
The search for “sharp prediction” – the mantra of the modern scientific economist who seeks to replicate the successes of physics for social science – is doomed to failure.
