From time to time important challenges emerge from the most unlikely sources. Like the Investor’s Chronicle’s dogged 1970s uncovering of Denys Lowson’s criminality, Lowson being a former Lord Mayor of the City of London. Or Computer Weekly’s ultimately successful campaigning against the bureaucracy’s claim of gross negligence on the part of the pilots of [...]
Following the demise of Lehman Brothers almost three years ago, the then UK government, being committed free market idealists and N word phobic, pumped trillions of taxpayers’ money into the economy to keep it buoyant. But it did so by funding banks which would otherwise have collapsed, and then trying lamely to persuade them to [...]
US presidential candidate, Michele Bachmann, stands up for the ordinary people of America, the factory workers and housewives, who she says are telling her to stand strong against raising taxes and to fight to reduce government spending, as the way to America’s economic salvation. But even in the self-reliant, can-do US culture, taxes are unavoidable. [...]
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 [...]
Two brothers. One got a real job and lived modestly at home with his parents. The other got the gambling bug and got clever at it. He found all sorts of obscure forms of gambling and developed sophisticated new techniques and methods and made a lot of money and lived a wild lifestyle. Till he [...]
Despite their much vaunted economic expertise, the leading national and global institutions failed to prevent the financial and economic crisis they’re now arguing over how to clear up. The IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) reported last month on why the IMF, as one such institution, failed to identify the risks and give clear warnings. [...]
The end of the self-defeating miners’ strike in 1985 led to the somewhat fundamentalist right wing government imposing severe restrictions on the unions’ rights to engage in industrial action. Despite the 13 years of Labour rule, those restrictions were never undone. So it remains extremely difficult, within the law, for the union movement to mount [...]
A recent article in The Economist pointed out that Britain, the original industrialiser for long in relative economic decline, owned 45% of the world’s foreign direct investment in 1914, but now has substantially less than 10%. The United States’ foreign direct investment peaked at around 50% in 1967 and is now less than half that. [...]
The desire to return to business as usual isn’t restricted to the obscenity of bankers’ bonuses. That same desire is shared by unemployed potters in Stoke on Trent, car workers in Detroit, and the governing politicians in London and Washington who are presiding over their people’s misery.
However, for the millions in China’s (not to [...]
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