Tag: Markets
Competition in banking does not necessarily benefit consumers
Limited competition may actually yield worse results for customers than either full-blooded competition or a cartel. Perhaps that explains the particularly tentative approach of the Competition and Markets Authority.
Taxi apps should be hailed for breaking the cabby cartel
Taxi licensing illustrates regulatory capture, the phenomenon by which regulation intended to serve the public is hijacked by industry interests.
The startling human progress that economists fail to see
The most important source of economic advance comes not from doing the same things better, but from achieving the same objective in a completely different way.
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.
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.
A fixation on liquidity is not healthy for financial markets
If we engineered the financial system with the same care and competence as the electricity network, financial crises would be less common.
The power of the bond markets is a bluff waiting to...
President Nicolas Sarkozy was reported to have told aides “if France loses its triple A rating, I’m dead”. A few days later France lost that status; a few months later, Mr Sarkozy was out of office.
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.
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.
Quantitative easing and the curious case of the leaky bucket
In the modern financial economy, the main effect of QE is to boost asset prices, as market gyrations of recent weeks have clearly illustrated. But is the pursuit of higher asset prices an effective or desirable means of promoting economic growth?
