Tag: Business
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.
Darwin’s humbling lesson for business
The match between capabilities and environment is the key to the success of the tortoise. It is also the key to successful business strategy, the effectiveness of institutions, and to personal development.
Don’t blame the havens – tax dodging is everyone else’s fault
Corporation tax is a tax on corporate activity and on shareholders, and it is not well designed to achieve either purpose.
Directors have a duty beyond just enriching shareholders
British law might have said that the duty of directors is simply to promote the interests of the company’s members. But it doesn’t – and that is no accident.
Enduring lessons from the legend of Rothschild’s carrier pigeon
Why do we devote more resources to training carrier pigeons and building fibreoptic links than to understanding military and business strategy?
Why business loves capital markets, even if it doesn’t need capital
One of the paradoxes of modern business is that firms have never had so little need of capital or so much involvement with capital markets.