Keeping zombie companies alive is a scary policy February 20, 2012 COMPANY insolvencies are a sign of a healthy economy and preventing companies from failing stifles the innovation this country needs to grow. Insolvencies, together with mergers and acquisitions, new company registrations, recruitment, and redundancies are, strange though it may seem to some, a sign of a healthy economy. Analysis of the number of new companies [...]
A new way to explain how much they spend February 20, 2012 SOME readers may be familiar with recent attempts to make US government spending plans easier to grasp by converting them to a representative family budget. Having recently returned from a weekend teaching in Croatia, I want to use it as a European example, hopefully shorn of the partisan emotions that can arise when discussing the [...]
RAPID RESPONSES February 20, 2012 Water pipedream [Re: Time to invest in infrastructure we actually need, yesterday] In 2006, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) studied the potential to transfer water using the established river network. At the time this was mistaken in media reports as recommending a national water grid but that was not what ICE proposed. ICE concluded, [...]
The EU’s proposed Tobin tax will raid pension funds. But not in France and Germany February 20, 2012 TAX pension savings now! Not a slogan you are likely to see emblazoned on banners in the Occupy the City demonstration outside St Paul’s or even on the lips of European commissioners, but that is precisely what is being proposed with the EU’s Financial Transaction Tax (FTT). Worse yet, not all EU citizens will face [...]
Time to invest in infrastructure we actually need February 19, 2012 IT MAY be winter and pretty rainy but now is the time to start thinking about this summer’s inevitable water shortages in southeast England. For years, the government’s strategy has been to ration water. Yet in parts of the UK it rains almost every other day all year long. The wet regions are economically deprived; [...]
The City can help build bridges to Gulf states February 19, 2012 AT A time when political tensions are running high in Syria, Iran and parts of the Gulf now might not seem like the best time to be leading a senior City business delegation to the region. Business confidence relies on a stable environment but despite the current uncertainty there remain huge two-way opportunities for closer [...]
RAPID RESPONSES February 19, 2012 Vive la difference [Re: Marc Sidwell’s column, Licensing the press – it’s just not very British, last Friday] The title of Sidwell’s column was apt. We only need to look across the channel to see the difference between Napoleonic prescriptive freedoms and British liberty. The French law of 29 July 1881 purports to guarantee freedom [...]
Ireland is plagued with debt it cannot repay and remains exposed to euro contagion February 16, 2012 FOR many, Ireland is the poster boy for how to deal with a banking crisis. I disagree. Lauded by European governments for its quick decisive actions, Ireland effectively contributed to bailing out the entire European banking system and, in doing so, has left a legacy of bankruptcy that puts huge financial pressure on its citizens [...]
We need better communication, not extra rules February 16, 2012 BRITAIN’S comply-or-explain system of corporate governance has come in for some stick in Brussels since the banking crisis. Sometimes dubbed self-regulation, it is seen as unreliable, and a number of senior officials have indicated their preference for codes to be replaced by more prescriptive regulation. Yet the facts tell a different story. Systematic research by [...]
Licensing journalists – it’s just not very British February 16, 2012 OUR national poets understood how much freedom matters. Milton! you should be living at this hour: England has need of you – William Wordsworth sighed at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In the second decade of the twenty-first, when British journalists are rounded up by the police in dawn raids and both a senior [...]