Tag: Regulation

There are fashions in economic indicators, as there are in designer clothes and management consultancy. Today, markets are obsessed with interest rates and house prices, while other microeceonomic factors are hardly debated.

Because no rule or code can define the character of a non-executive, even boards compliant with every code and regulation will range from the effective to the useless. Shareholders should keep an eye on excessive remuneration and vainglorious acquisitions, and intervene in issues of management succession when it appears that non-executive directors have become too close to the company to do a proper job.

Genetics is the most exciting of today's new technologies and has the potential to revolutionise nutrition and medicine. Yet, when it comes to GM food, we are patronised by a discredited government department, misled by campaign groups yearning for publicity, and let down by companies whose self-interest is ridiculously obvious.

A nodding acquaintance with modern finance theory tells you that the strategy of Equitable Life was the financial equivalent of alchemy or perpetual motion. Yet, Lord Penrose is wrong to believe that tighter regulation is the best solution – the only answer is higher standards of both ethics and competence in the whole financial services industry.

Most bad economic policies can be abandoned, but the harmful effects of restrictive licensing systems are usually irreversible. By illustrating the flaws of taxi regulation, John explains why governments and licensing authorities should think twice before being caught in a transitional gains trap.

David Hare’s play on rail privatisation, The Permanent Way, offers drama along classical Shakespearean lines – what is foredoomed to fail, fails. However, as an intriguing conversation reveals, Hare seems to have missed a key point.

Europe once took 75 per cent of Nobel prizes; today the US does. It is less widely appreciated that this is the triumph of autonomous institutions over government-controlled ones.

The end of the stability and growth pact will be a victory rather than a defeat if it leads to new ways of monitoring and controlling fiscal policy. John explains the need for governments to delegate responsibility for setting taxes.

Are the increasingly frequent failures in electricity supply the result of privatisation and deregulation?

The market truly values advisers it can trust; subsequently the effort to impress may have the opposite results.