Tag: Business
Scottish independence matters less than you think
The centre of political gravity in Scotland is far to the left of that of the UK and that is at the centre of the concerns – widely held but little expressed – of Scottish business over independence.
Being ethical in business is not as simple as ‘doing the...
Ethics are about what to do when good behaviour and profitable business are not necessarily the same thing.
Britain’s ‘great leap forward’ was start of nuclear power failure
British technological failures have been compounded by a political phenomenon I have come to think of as “great leap forward syndrome”. The idea is that the best way to compensate for stumbles and missteps is to move, at one bound, ahead of the field.
To secure stability, treat finance and fast food alike
If I had a million pounds for every time I have heard a possible reform opposed because “it wouldn’t have prevented Northern Rock or Lehman Brothers going bust”, I might now have enough money to bail out a bank.
Why I ignore Apple’s silly reams of terms and conditions
My decision not to read the terms of agreement when purchasing a new television is not the result of my stupidity and ignorance, but my wisdom.
Sometimes, a spot of collusion can be a very good thing
Modern life involves complex and multidimensional products. It is perhaps inevitable that price structures appear similarly complex and multidimensional.
Ronald Coase: Nobel Prize winner who explored why companies exist
Ronald Coase, who has died at the age of 102, played a key part in developing the intellectual arguments behind the market revolution that swept round the world in the 1980s.
Sometimes the best that a company can hope for is death
Humans have always found it hard to cope with the idea that every individual has a lifespan even as life itself goes on. The idea of a natural life cycle for a business, or industrial centre, is even more difficult to accept.
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.
The market is not the best place to set a fair...
What happened at Enron, and in the banks, was that trading assets were marked to values that had been established not by people who knew about the contracts or the loans, but by the biased and ill-informed assessments of the traders.
