Nick Clegg’s ambition to lift the poor from tax is a lesson for Tories over low pay September 16, 2013 WHAT makes a popular policy that can capture the public imagination? Policy, like politics, is best when it provides a noble purpose. A fight against injustice. A sense of direction. Ideas brutally simple to understand. Take Margaret Thatcher’s “Right to Buy”. A noble purpose? Allowing council tenants to own their homes. A fight against injustice? [...]
We should replace Fed monetary superheroes with rules-based policy September 16, 2013 LARRY Summers is out of the race to succeed Ben Bernanke as Fed chair. After months of debate, with politicians and media picking over Summers’s personality and background, the spotlight has returned to Janet Yellen, deputy Fed chairwoman. Is she now a certainty? Or is another monetary superhero about to emerge? All of this recalls [...]
Letters to the editor – 17/09 – House price bubble, Best of Twitter September 16, 2013 House price bubble [Re: Artificially limiting rises in house prices will do more harm than good, yesterday] Philip Booth is the voice of reason, rightly pointing out that we have one of the most restrictive land-use planning policies in Europe. I am surprised that the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors has called for these limiting [...]
Disruptive technology isn’t a miracle: We can harness its future power now September 15, 2013 THE ASTONISHING rise of firms like Twitter (founded just seven years ago, yet now expected to float for $10bn), is often seen as a grand romantic narrative – an exciting story, difficult to predict. But transformation, disruption, and change should be easier to forecast. The only weapon we need is the deceptively simple power of [...]
City Matters: Britain’s seafaring past is still shaping the City’s culture and economy today September 15, 2013 WHEN people talk about the “City”, they often do so solely in terms of its banks – and financial services. These are a central element of what the City does, but this leaves out a whole side of the Square Mile that is just as important: the second thing we sum up in the handy [...]
Artificially limiting rises in house prices will do more harm than good September 15, 2013 ECONOMISTS should be humbled by Friedrich Hayek’s famous plea: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” If only government and central banks – and those who lobby them – realised how little good came from their proposed interventions, and how [...]
Letters to the Editor – 16/09 – House price cap, Startup survival, Best of Twitter September 15, 2013 House price cap [Re: Industry calls to limit lending won’t fix our bust housing system, Friday] A policy of the state intervening to cap house prices will strangle our fragile growth and exclude more people from home ownership. In economics, supply must meet demand. We need to fix the supply issues through less red tape [...]
Bernanke’s successor will have more than monetary policy to worry about September 12, 2013 US FEDERAL Reserve watchers have taken a break from trying to figure out when the Fed will cut off its bond-buying programme to speculate about who will succeed chairman Ben Bernanke when his second term finishes at the end of January 2014. We haven’t had the opportunity to pick a Fed chair since before the [...]
The Long View: The key to effective action? Don’t view the world in those nifty shades of grey September 12, 2013 SHADES of grey are fashionable – and not just because of those kinky books. If there’s one ideal that the modern intellectual class likes to celebrate, to praise in students and respect in authority, it is a fine, discriminating eye for picking out the full spectrum of grey on any issue. Monochrome thought is for [...]
Self-driving pods and 3D printing will be the real challenge for Royal Mail September 12, 2013 TWENTY years ago, as the web came into existence, it was obvious that Royal Mail would be carrying fewer personal and business letters by now, that there would be a vast rise in junk mail and another huge increase in parcel deliveries thanks to online buying. All of those expectations have come true. After a [...]