The media expressed shock and horror that Centrica should jack its prices up to its customers and pass £1.3bn of its surplus profits back to its shareholders. But why? That’s what Centrica’s directors think they are there for. And the media and most everyone else appears to share that misunderstanding that it’s the legal duty [...]
Among all the debate about the vices and virtues of capitalism there is rarely any serious attempt to define its key characteristics. Whatever they are, they appear to work better than the best known alternative that’s so far been tried: centrally planned totalitarian communism. Whether good capitalism or bad, compassionate, predatory or even ‘conscious’, [...]
Globalisation reduces the cost of goods and services as their production migrates to the lowest cost parts of the world. The lower prices are a benefit for everyone and the low cost parts of the world, which are only now beginning to industrialise, gain tremendously in terms of economic growth and employment. So globalisation is [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The threat to the world’s liberty today comes from the monopolistic power of unregulated corporates. That is exercised mainly through banks such as Goldman Sachs and financial intermediaries and traders such as Glencore. A year ago the Financial Times ran a series of articles showing how Glencore fix commodity prices for their own profit and [...]
Unilever’s Paul Polman must be a Chief Executive in a million. Or more. In his interview with Guardian Sustainable Business, Polman calls on business leaders, politicians and NGOs to recognise they cannot deal with the world’s environmental and social challenges by pursuit of Milton Friedman’s target of maximising shareholder wealth. Polman names a few other [...]
Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein, Citibank’s Vikram Pandit and, of course, Barclay’s Bob Diamond, all have something in common. Even their normally acquiescent shareholders have been moved to express concern about their latest round of excess, greed and thuggery. But they are only the tip of the ice-berg. It has become custom and practice for top people [...]
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