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’, [...]
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 [...]
The Financial Services Authority’s report on the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland is published this morning and this afternoon the Prime Minister will explain to parliament the reasons for last week opting out of some of the EU decision processes. The one, an examination of disastrous failing in the financial sector and the [...]
The centrally planned socialist alternative has been tried and didn’t work. Even without the bureaucracy and corruption enabled by the communist system, central planning could never be as efficient or effective as a real market. But, as we are currently experiencing, unregulated markets can also lead to disaster. Most of our current trouble lies in [...]
It seems impossible to ignore the Murdoch saga: the seedy old martinet, his chosen heir apparent and the family sycophants and hangers on, shades of the Duvaliers’ era in Haiti, or a dozen or more banana republic tyrants. The Murdochs are clearly prepared to be as ruthless and dishonest as it takes in pursuit of [...]
The announcement of around 1400 job losses at the Bombardier rail works in Derby signals the beginning of the end-of-life stage for another great British manufacturing industry, resulting more or less entirely from the incompetence and stupidity of the ‘madmen in authority’. Their latest incarnation, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond, was interviewed this morning on BBC [...]
On 1st September, 1976, Professor Milton Friedman of Chicago University, economic theoretician and Nobel laureate, addressed the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. The title of his talk was “The Road to Economic Freedom: The Steps from Here to There”. Friedman, being the quintessential free market fundamentalist, took a dim view of the mixed [...]
As announced this week, the John Lewis partnership is raising £50m to finance further expansion by issuing a savings bond to its ‘partners’ and customers. If it succeeds it would make a lot of expensive City activity seem rather unnecessary, and its success is not seriously in doubt. The bond will return 4.5% gross plus [...]
The pattern of technological progress has been found to be surprisingly consistent. New technology has to clear various hurdles before attracting funds for its commercial development. A successful project that gets fully exploited grows fast, all the time getting detailed improvements and added features. Eventually, progress begins to slow, returns from further R&D diminish and [...]
The takeover of British confectioner Cadbury, with its long and honourable history in British industry, from its Quaker origins to its death throes earlier this year, has been featured as the main topic of two posts on this site, and mentioned in passing on five others. It is a compulsive story which celebrates the satisfaction [...]
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