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 [...]
Ed Balls is talking about Labour’s ‘big strategy’ decisions on taxation and spending. He wants to be seen as ‘ruthless and disciplined’ about ‘every penny’ of public spending. Hence his ‘zero-based budgeting review’, which is really a bit of motherhood flim-flam, totally devoid of specifics, dreamed up for the benefit of credulous voters.
The [...]
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 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 [...]
How does a basic item of clothing, say a shirt, come into existence? Where does the cloth come from? And the colours or dyes, the buttons and thread, the machines that cut the fabric and the machines that stitch the bits together? And who dreamed up the designs and how did they get [...]
A news item on budget day, commanding all of two column inches on an inside page of some of the national press, was of far greater importance than anything Mr Osborne had to say. It reported the completion of Glencore’s acquisition of Viterra, Canada’s largest grain handling company. Glencore, the world’s largest by far commodity [...]
All sorts of hares are set loose in the run up to the budget: removal of the 50% income tax rate, ending of national pay settlements in the public sector, imposition of a mansion tax, a clamp down on stamp duty avoidance, and so on, not to mention the various stimulus–austerity alternatives. Debate centres around [...]
Mr Cameron really doesn’t understand what’s going on. When he talks of rebalancing the economy he appears not to have the faintest idea what has unbalanced it. He doesn’t understand the crucial difference between real markets and financial markets. Demand for real things is essentially finite – when you’ve had enough, you’ve had enough; [...]
A couple of “industries”, audit and management consultancy, which have deliberately entwined themselves round each other and called themselves ‘professional services’, have developed strongly monopolistic tendencies. The degree of industry concentration is truly remarkable: the four leading firms employ around 650,000 people, earn revenues of over US$100 billion, and take around 80% of the global [...]
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 [...]
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