Tag: Finance
How the health and safety culture can curb moral hazard
What does the death rate from violent accident in England over seven centuries tell us about moral hazard in the financial system?
Regulators will get the blame for the stupidity of crowds
Just as dammed water finds new channels of escape, crowdfunding seems to provide a way around the blockage.
Do not criminalise traders just for being in the know
Obtaining better information about companies is essential to the efficiency of markets and society: obtaining it fractionally earlier is of no public value at all.
Economists: there is no such thing as the ‘economic approach’
Economics is not a method but a subject – one defined by the problems it sets out to tackle not the techniques it uses.
Is it better to play it safe or to place bets...
Although transactions with low probability of large loss and high probability of small gain carry the potential for disaster, they can appear attractive for a very long time – perhaps for ever.
London’s mayor is half right on envy, greed and inequality
Envy is both inseparable from economic progress and destructive of social cohesion. Some inequality is inevitable, and there seem to be three principal factors that make it more tolerable.
The design flaws that lead to financial explosions
Nuclear power and financial systems both have the capacity to blow up the world. Perhaps there are lessons from one for the other.
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.
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.
The Nobel committee is muddled on the nature of economics
Financial economics, for half a century a showpiece in economic departments, is today struggling to maintain credibility in the face of the financial instability of the past two decades.
