Every day, the BBC – in fact the whole media circus – faithfully report the progress of the FTSE100 share index, as though it were a portent of our economic future. Every day so called “experts” explain in detail the reasons for FTSE100 movements seemingly on the assumption that it still relates to the UK [...]
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’, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
A typically indecisive Will Hutton article in The Observer (29.1.12) was headed ‘Hester’s pay discredits bonus culture’. Did Will Hutton think, despite the works of Bob Diamond, Fred the Shred and the rest, that the bonus culture still had credit up to the time when Stephen Hester was awarded his relatively modest bonus of around [...]
The Occupy Wall Street protest has been described as a deeply instinctive movement to defend America’s traditional values. So far, it has been a peaceful, dignified and respectful, almost wistful, restatement by disparate groups of belief in fairness, individual freedom, democracy, the rule of law and, of course, the social mobility embodied in ‘the American [...]
People are, and have always been, able to persuade themselves to believe the weirdest things. If a theory is not testable then it is either rejected or it becomes a matter of belief, which people can be readily persuaded to accept and even proclaim with varying degrees of conviction. Economic theory is by no means [...]
There is quite a catalogue of actual and potential man-made disasters. They include the risk of Greece defaulting on its debts, followed by Portugal, Ireland and the collapse of the Eurozone, the hollowing out of real economy firms particularly in the UK and to a slightly lesser extent the US, the explosion in inequality of [...]
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 [...]
The system is wrong, not the people. The financial sector is out of control and is screwing the rest of us. We know traders will trade in anything that looks like making a profit. We know they make profits out of rising prices, and falling prices, it’s just a matter of betting correctly. And we [...]
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