Regulation has pushed pharma off a cliff edge February 5, 2012 THE latest big pharma company to fall victim to the so-called “patent cliff” is AstraZeneca. Its announcement last week that it’s shedding 7,300 jobs globally is in part an acknowledgement that it does not have sufficient new drugs to replace revenues lost, as a number of its key drugs come off patent. Across the sector, [...]
Dickens gives a lesson on the value of money February 5, 2012 TOMORROW marks the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, an author whose writing made a continuous and concerted effort to marry the concepts of prosperity and morality. It is right, therefore, that, in view of the challenges we currently face, we celebrate the life and works of a great writer and Londoner. Never before [...]
RAPID RESPONSES February 5, 2012 Growing negative You are spot on (Britain is now an anti-business nation, last Thursday). These days I find the Conservative party an enigma – whatever happened to deregulation, low taxes and minimal state control, which are the core drivers for growth in any successful economy? We seem to be doomed to decades of low, or [...]
Billionaire Zuckerberg says it’s not about money, but he is a consummate capitalist February 2, 2012 A few years ago a very clever young man created a platform that changed the art of communication forever. Its impact is still reverberating, its democratisation of information leading to revolutions and toppling world leaders. Its creator was a maverick and – like most mavericks – he was not immune to controversy. The beginnings of [...]
Free trade and property rights come naturally February 2, 2012 THOSE who dislike the idea of individual freedom often accuse its proponents of dishing up just as artificial a plan for the human race as that offered by social planners. “There’s no such thing as a free market,” they say. “It’s all culturally determined.” It’s nice then to find some evidence from the psychologist Ori [...]
RAPID RESPONSES February 2, 2012 Get up, stand up Great article by Gina Miller (Join our campaign to fight fund managers’ high fees and lack of transparency, Wednesday). Financial services, as an industry, has always been overpriced for the value it adds. Transparent performance related charges for investment products is the way to go, especially if they are returnable when [...]
The Eurozone will implode, but it isn’t too late to learn from past monetary unions February 1, 2012 FOR a long time it was taboo to suggest the Eurozone would collapse – now people write and talk of little else. Currency break-up is inevitable, but despite the twists and turns a workable solution isn’t in sight. Although it’s impossible to predict the precise outcome, previous monetary unions offer insights into what went wrong [...]
Apprenticeships in Britain plainly have not worked February 1, 2012 POLITICIANS faced by persistent social problems often dream of reviving old institutions. Youth unemployment in Britain recently passed 1m. No surprise, then, that historical solutions are being proposed for the UK’s present day problems with youth training. Politicians of all stripes believe that increasing access to apprenticeships will turn those young people not in employment, [...]
Romney will be hoping victory comes swiftly February 1, 2012 IT COST Mitt Romney approximately $16m to win Florida’s 50 delegates. The one thing he couldn’t afford in Florida was defeat. But Romney didn’t just come back from a double-digit poll deficit – he did something much more impressive. Newt Gingrich remarked that a strong second would save his “totally unique” campaign. With a landslide [...]
RAPID RESPONSES February 1, 2012 A critical state George Osborne commented on the loss of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood by stating “RBS came to symbolise everything that went wrong in the British economy in the last decade”. This is a perplexing statement from the man charged with sorting out the public finances. The years of artificially low interest rates that provided [...]