A lack of leadership is tearing Europe apart September 21, 2011 IN a moment of truth after losing referendums in France, the Netherlands and Ireland, Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, admitted to me that the EU could seem like a conspiracy by political elites against their citizens. Never has that been truer than of the euro crisis, which really is crunch time for Europe. [...]
RAPID RESPONSES September 21, 2011 Boris backs us With the crisis in the Eurozone deepening and world markets shakier than ever, headlines of financial Armageddon are today vying for space with stories of celebrity gossip. It can be tempting for commentators to shoot from the hip during times like these, but we must resist populist, reactionary instincts when trying to [...]
Eject Greece if you want to save the euro from sinking, warns a leading economist September 20, 2011 RATINGS agency Fitch was reported yesterday as predicting that Greece would default but not leave the euro. The reality now is that the kind of long-term solution that will be necessary to save the euro requires a euro of which Greece is not a member. The longer a Greek default and euro exit are delayed [...]
We need growth, minister: get off your hobbyhorse September 20, 2011 DURING his speech to the Liberal Democrats in Birmingham, business secretary Vince Cable warned that we are facing a crisis “the economic equivalent of war”. While that might be an overstatement, we can’t argue with the facts. Unemployment stands at 2.51m, inflation is at 4.5 per cent, and a Eurozone crisis threatens the confidence of [...]
Politicians don’t know how incentives work September 20, 2011 THE chancellor George Osborne and business secretary Vince Cable believe that Britain’s economic problems are partly to be blamed on poorly designed incentive schemes. They believe that senior businessmen are “rewarded for failure”. If this were true, it would indeed be a problem. But the idea is preposterous. Why would the owners of a company [...]
RAPID RESPONSES September 20, 2011 Euro exhaustion We need long term economic restructuring to make the euro function by assisting struggling countries – flogging them through zero-growth austerity is pointless. I’m not sure the degree of political understanding or will to make the euro work is present any more. Chronic electoral and investor fatigue is making us too weary. If [...]
A former Liberal Democrat spin-doctor says Cable’s off message on executive pay September 19, 2011 THE Liberal Democrats have spent much of their conference getting themselves into a sweat about the rich. Both Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander have signalled their reluctance to scrap the top rate of income tax, with the latter announcing the creation of 2,000 new tax collectors to ensure compliance among high earners. Don’t expect that [...]
Why Ocado isn’t delivering as the markets hoped September 19, 2011 WHEN Ocado came to the market in July 2010, to some (its investors) it was a great opportunity to buy into a growth online market with a unique business model and amazing technology. The company had been going for ten years and was just about to break through the tipping point, which would lead profits [...]
We need banks to fail more often – not less September 19, 2011 THE Independent Commission on Banking (ICB) has spoken, but not too loudly and with no real urgency. Even if its main recommendations are eventually adopted (such as ring-fencing the retail and investment arms of banks and raising capital requirements), few people feel that this will fix the banking sector’s problems. Even if these measures work, [...]
RAPID RESPONSES September 19, 2011 ICB bright side The ICB report was puerile: a politically-inspired piece of financial vandalism. But with regulatory damage both capped and deferred, notwithstanding the dire macro outlook and dysfunctional political landscape, we still believe that we are into a (bumpy) period of UK bank share price recovery, but one in which, in relative terms, the [...]