Tag: Accountability

Casinos attract greedy people with deficient ethics: the fear this engenders frames regulation, the obligations we impose on executives and the culture we expect from operating companies. Perhaps banks should operate to standards as high as those of casinos.

When we make hiring decisions, or construct risk maps, or undertake investment appraisals we complete templates, the purpose of which is not to help us manage or decide but to rationalise what we already believe we know.

Young people might reasonably ask their parents or grandparents why a much richer society cannot now provide the benefits it provided for an earlier generation. I am not sure I have a good answer.

Governments will in the end always put voters ahead of prior commitments or external obligations. That democratic imperative has costs and benefits – but, overall, the benefits of popular accountability far exceed the cost.

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responsibility for any of the blunders that seemed to happen wherever he was in charge, ministerial accountability had been replaced by T.S. Eliot’s cat: “When a crime’s discovered, then Macavity’s not there.”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...

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.