Vince Cable is fighting yesterday’s battles on boardroom pay April 22, 2014 THE VINCE Cable show is back on the road. The business secretary is up to his old tricks again, waging war on business. He writes in a letter to FTSE bosses that “excessive and disproportionate pay damages popular trust in business” and that it “undermines business’ licence to operate”. It’s a shame he didn’t make [...]
Hurrah – British companies are finally starting to invest again April 22, 2014 SLOWLY but surely, companies are starting to spend again, buying machines, computers and software and thus gradually beginning to rebalance the recovery. As a result, my worst fears – that the entirety of this recovery would be consumer-driven – haven’t so far materialised. Fortunately, the nightmare that was 2012 – when consumer spending rose by [...]
Britain’s jobs miracle: A case of supply creating its own demand April 17, 2014 BRITAIN has turned into a giant jobs factory. The number of people in work surged by 691,000 over the past year, despite continuing reductions in the public sector’s headcount – that is a 2.3 per cent rise and the highest rate of growth since 1989, a period of extremely strong (and ultimately unsustainable) economic growth. [...]
Inflation is a nasty stealth tax. We should celebrate its defeat April 15, 2014 INFLATION, as Milton Friedman used to argue, is a form of taxation without legislation. Wealth is taken from some people – for example, holders of cash – and given to others – such as those with large debts. The process is stealthy, opaque, unpredictable and undemocratic, badly understood by citizens, and one of many reasons [...]
Ukraine fatally weakened by failure to embrace real capitalism April 14, 2014 IN the dreadful communist days, Ukraine and Poland used to be equally poor. The former was part of the Soviet Union, and Poland was one of the USSR’s satellite nations, belonging to the Warsaw pact. In 1990, both countries had roughly the same GDP per capita – their economies were eerily similar. A quarter of [...]
The recovery is being driven by a revolution in the jobs market April 14, 2014 ON the face of it at least, all is going swimmingly well for the British economy. The best news continues to be on jobs, but GDP is also powering ahead, pay is growing on some measures and falling far less rapidly on others, and a more confident attitude is becoming increasingly entrenched across British boardrooms. [...]
Crazed global investors have become gluttons for punishment April 10, 2014 CREDITORS are strange beasts: they appear to have virtually zero memory, to be gluttons for punishment and to embrace rewards for failure. There can be no other possible explanation for Greece’s astonishingly successful return to the bond markets yesterday – apart, that is, from the fact that there is clearly far too much cash burning [...]
Why Sajid Javid could soon become the Tories’ great hope April 9, 2014 IT is a remarkable story. When Dadabhai Naoroji was elected as the Liberal Party member for Finsbury Central at the 1892 general election, the Mumbai-born became Britain’s first Asian MP. He was soon followed by Sir Mancherjee Bhownagree, elected in 1895 as the Tory MP for Bethnal Green North East. But it took another 122 [...]
We are finally starting to get a more grown-up debate on the EU April 8, 2014 AT SOME point over the next few years, the UK will have to decide once and for all what it wants Its relationship with the European Union to be. This is a crucial debate, albeit one where intelligent and well-meaning people who broadly share the same outlook on many other issues will still find it [...]
Everything we thought we knew about the economy is wrong April 7, 2014 FACTS are sacred, unlike mere subjective opinions – or so most sensible people believe. In reality, as every good French philosopher would tell you, what we trust to be objective data-based truths all too often turn out to be social constructs. We are about to see a beautiful demonstration of this with the British economy, [...]