Tag: Politics
A real energy revolution needs us to look beyond sound bites
To be able to use power the UK needs to build power stations, but it is easier to posture, prevaricate and procrastinate than to take decisions.
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?
Britain is leading the world on banking reform
Globally, the Bank of England has been the main source of fresh and sceptical thinking on the future of the financial sector. While this has won it few friends in the City of London, such unpopularity is a mark of success not failure.
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.
The tyranny of the minority in the age of technology
Most people have little time or energy to devote to politics, which enables small groups with a strong commercial, personal or ideological motivation to exert disproportionate influence.
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.
Sinister or silly, protest politicians are united in grievance
The inability of democratic politics to handle the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has threatened to undermine the apparent consensus on liberal democracy and lightly regulated capitalism that emerged following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Sovereign Scots may have to drop sterling
If I represented the Scottish government in the extensive negotiations required by the creation of an independent state, I would try to secure a monetary union with England, and expect to fail.
Prosperity requires more than rule of law
When the Chinese ask how to establish the institutions to support a stable, prosperous economy, it is not enough to mumble: “Property rights and rule of law – go to Denmark and see.”
