Almost 5 years after the crash, the UK economy remains in the doldrums. Now even the IMF is critical of the UK’s austerity programme. But the government is not for turning from its basic pursuit of austerity plus miniscule photo opportunity gestures like letting small businesses off their National Insurance contributions for a period. But [...]
So President Francois Hollande has not given up on his election promise to levy a 75% tax on those who pay themselves, or get paid, in excess of €1m (£840,000) pa. The French high court rejected his original proposal, but it seems the revised version, to levy the tax on the payers rather than [...]
Back in July last year, this site pondered what would replace the public company, formerly the most powerful institution in the economy (see http://www.gordonpearson.co.uk/11/what-will-replace-the-public-company/). Its numbers had halved over the past decade and the number of small and medium sized firms’ initial public offerings had declined by more than 80%. Shareholders’ funds appeared [...]
After the Rigor rate fixing scandal, and the PPI mis-selling fiasco, we now have hysteria over gas and electricity companies fixing market prices to their advantage at the expense of the general customer. Well of course they’ve been doing that, it’s what they do. They aren’t charities. They charge whatever the market will bear. [...]
Will Hutton is courageously idiosyncratic about innovation, proposing a simple combination of general purpose technologies (GPTs) and good capitalism as the explanation for the rapid rise in living standards in the west over the last 250 years. For Hutton, the source of growth is ‘the combination of science’s capacity to transform how we live and [...]
Just over a year after his arrest, Kweku Adoboli’s case has finally reached court. He is in the dock nominally for fraud and false accounting, but actually for losing his employer, Swiss bank UBS, around $2.3bn. Now at last, Adoboli’s defence lawyers have the opportunity to make his case. Which is: that the bank had [...]
When J M Keynes used the term ‘madmen in authority’ he was referring to his contemporary equivalents of David Cameron and George Osborne. At the end of last year, though he talked about it incessantly, it was clear that Cameron had limited understanding of the need to rebalance the economy – see http://www.gordonpearson.co.uk/09/mr-cameron-doesn%e2%80%99t-understand/. The [...]
An article in the current issue of Harvard Business Review notes that there has been a ‘multi-trillion dollar transfer of cash from US corporations to their shareholders over the past 10 years’ [‘What good are shareholders?’, Fox & Lorsch]. The City of London achieved similar disinvestment. But that’s not what stock markets are supposed to [...]
The public company, the corporate form that Chandler once described as the most powerful institution in the economy and which made industrialisation possible, is rapidly becoming an endangered species. Over the past decade the number of public companies in the UK has almost halved and declined by 38% in the United States. Similarly, the number [...]
‘Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’. Practical men, say, like Bob Diamond. You can’t get much more practical than a man of limited intellect who takes from his place of work £17m a year, less a bit for having led [...]
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