So much for the election. Now America must regain its mojo November 6, 2012 AS ever, the actual voting was the easy bit. The truly epic task comes next: trying to mend the US economy. Contemporary America is a strange place: in some ways, it remains astonishingly successful; in others, remarkably weak. More than ever, the giant has feet of clay, a tragedy for those of us who love [...]
City jobs bloodbath shows that backlash has gone too far November 5, 2012 IT is time to start worrying about London’s financial and business services industry. The City is in crisis, with job cuts spiralling out of control. As we report on our front page, City-style jobs – investment banking, securities, corporate finance, trading, research, derivatives and forex, fund management (including hedge funds and private equity), insurance and [...]
America’s jobs nightmare requires fresh thinking November 5, 2012 TOMORROW is decision day for Americans, who must choose who they want to see in the White House for the next four years: Barack Obama, the Democratic incumbent, or Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger. America will also be voting for a new Congress. This newspaper is not shy of giving its endorsements to candidates in [...]
World’s freest economies managed to avoid banking crisis November 1, 2012 IT is usually claimed that the financial crisis was caused by excessively free markets. Those of us who disagree – and emphasise governments’s role in distorting markets, including by subsidising risk via the moral hazard caused by insane taxpayer guarantees and by fuelling credit and property bubbles via excessively loose monetary policy – are in [...]
David Cameron deserved to be defeated on the EU budget October 31, 2012 IT is hard to know what David Cameron, the Prime Minister, is playing at. His humiliating defeat at the hands of an unholy alliance of Tory Eurosceptic MPs and Labour opportunists was yet another blow to his authority. The rebels’ cause was a good one: Cameron wants to freeze the EU budget in real terms [...]
A corporatist economic growth plan that won’t rescue UK Plc October 30, 2012 IT is impossible not to like Michael Heseltine. He is an astonishingly successful individual, a great entrepreneur, a passionate speaker who genuinely cares about the poor, and a man who almost became Prime Minister. The tragedy is that while his goals are laudable the means he wishes to use to achieve them are generally deeply [...]
Frankenstorm: Don’t fall foul of the Broken Windows Fallacy October 29, 2012 THERE are times, fortunately not too often in these days of technological revolution and extraordinary scientific progress, that human beings can but bow to the forces of nature. We may be capable of flying to the moon but there are some natural events that leave us powerless and unable to control events. Everybody with family, [...]
How income tax has become such a nightmare for so many October 29, 2012 WHENEVER you hear a politician promising that a painful measure will be purely temporary, run for the woods, tin hat in hand. The most painful of all policies, the income tax, was first introduced in Britain as an emergency measure to pay for the Napoleonic wars. From the beginning, as Kwasi Kwarteng and Priti Patel, [...]
Great boost to the economy – but public still feeling pain October 25, 2012 IT is not every day that the British economy gives us cause to celebrate, so we should all make the most of yesterday’s excellent third quarter GDP growth figures. The economy bounced back by one per cent compared with the second quarter, which was very good going by any measure. The figures need to be [...]
Coalition must not become complacent on economic growth October 24, 2012 UNLIKE some commentators, I don’t think David Cameron did anything especially wrong yesterday. He hinted at Prime Minister’s Question Time that the economy was improving; he didn’t leak the GDP figures. The statistics will be published this morning; so there is little point speculating about them. But it is worth noting that when the Prime [...]