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 [...]
Join our campaign to fight fund managers’ high fees and lack of transparency January 31, 2012 IT IS time to give investors a better deal. That is why SCM Private – the wealth managers of which I am a partner – is today launching a campaign proposing a True and Fair Code and Universal Labelling system for all UK investment products. Through this scheme consumers would, for the first time, have [...]
Being a company director is now a high risk gamble January 31, 2012 WITH the debate on executive pay raging, the wider question that everyone should be asking is: Why would anyone want to be a director in the first place? Over time, directors’ duties have been aggressively extended and however well they do their job, directors are at risk of criminal and other serious liabilities quite apart [...]