Tag: Industry Analysis
Finance spread its own risks but left ours alone
The risks that the financial sector has devised techniques to manage are not the everyday risks of an uncertain world: they are risks almost entirely created within the financial sector itself.
The need for structural reform in banking
While there may be some economies of scope in the provision of financial services, they don't in any event compare in order of magnitude with the collateral economic damage imposed by recent failures in the financial sector.
Cutting costs so often leads to cutting corners
Today’s managers are victims of the tyranny of the quarterly earnings report. And that is why yesterday’s cost-savings are so often today’s corporate crisis.
Sir John Vickers will hear a lot of tosh on separation...
The Independent Commission on Banking headed by Sir John Vickers which the coalition Government has established will be told that such a separation between utility and casino can't be done – although it was done in Britain for most of the 20th century.
We should all have a say in how banks are reformed
More competition and a reduction of the conflicts of interest between different financial services activities is the antidote to gouging. The separation of retail and investment banking would begin a move away from the transaction-focused, sales-driven culture of recent years and reassert the development of long-term relationships with customers.
Bankers can’t blame the UK housing market
It was not British housebuyers who took on debts they could not repay in the recent boom: it was British banks.
How to make money without trying
It is particularly sad for me that James Black, the Nobel prize winning chemist, should have died in the same week that my latest book, Obliquity, is published. I am indebted to Black for helping to frame the idea – and for proposing the term “obliquity” to describe it.
Sex, profits and rock ’n’ roll
The lesson of EMI is not that media industries are unique, but that you can lose a lot of money if you overpay for a company with a broken business model, as you can in any other industry.
Why ‘too big to fail’ insurance is the worst of all...
“Too big to fail” insurance is likely to leave the non-financial economy with the worst of all possible worlds – less public control of risk and greater potential calls on taxpayers.
Freefall – Joseph Stiglitz
This is the best book so far on the financial crisis. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist, is knowledgeable about the historical background, immersed...
