I’ll give London’s businesses the support and freedom they need to thrive January 27, 2016 From tech startups to street markets, black cabs to global banks, London’s businesses are what make our city great. As mayor, I’ll make it my business to deliver for them. Last week I launched my Action Plan for Greater London: more homes, better transport, cleaner air and safer streets. These are issues that matter to [...]
Markets aren’t necessarily telling the truth about the state of the global economy January 27, 2016 The opening month of 2016 has been marked by sharp falls in asset prices, not just in financial markets but in commodities such as oil too. The conventional wisdom is that the markets form a rational assessment of future prospects for the economy and set prices accordingly. So if prices fall, we should be downgrading our [...]
Ignore Google’s corporation tax bill – and scrap the tax altogether January 27, 2016 It would be easy to believe, from the coverage of Google’s £130m tax deal with the Exchequer, that corporations are a big pot of money from which we can take as much as we like, limited only by their cunning wiles, our bumbling and/or complicit tax men, and our foolishly malleable tax rules. But this couldn’t [...]
After a Brexit war game found prospects for the UK outside the EU are bleak, should we take the result seriously? January 27, 2016 Rajesh Agrawal, founder and chief executive of RationalFX and Xendpay and business adviser to Labour’s London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan, says Yes. The EU gives us access without barriers to 500m customers, £24bn of foreign investment and the clout of negotiating as part of the world’s largest trade bloc. Britain could of course go it alone, [...]
How the next mayor can turn London into a truly digital city January 26, 2016 In a little over three months, Londoners will elect a new mayor. When we last went to the polls in 2012, London’s tech industry was only just starting to bloom, but since then it has gone on to become the driving force of the capital’s economy. The next mayor will take the helm of the undisputed [...]
Forget speed bumps and cycle lanes: Why Britain’s roads should be more like ice rinks January 26, 2016 Over the festive period, many of you would have ventured to Somerset House or Winter Wonderland to ice-skate. Taking to the rink, you would have seen children skating for the first time while clasping their parent’s hand, as other adults whizzed round at high speed. Each individual, including you, moved at their own speed, judging [...]
How we can mobilise public sector land to build the homes London needs January 26, 2016 In 1941, under tremendous pressure to increase food production, the war cabinet commissioned a National Farm Survey. It sought to identify uncultivated agricultural land, as well as new land to support the dig for victory. It resulted in 36,000 maps and was nicknamed the “Second Domesday Book”. Under pressure to identify land for new homes [...]
With Twitter shares down 55 per cent from a year ago, is the future of the social media platform secure? January 26, 2016 Nick Leech, digital director of 123-reg, the domain registrar and hosting company, says Yes. Twitter does have a future, but investors and the public need to keep their expectations for that future in line. Twitter is not going to rival the mass adoption that Facebook is recognised for, and it’s not going to have the [...]
The Big Long: Will the Shell-BG deal pay off? January 26, 2016 The Big Short landed in UK cinemas this weekend. The film adaptation of Michael Lewis’s best-selling novel tells the story of Wall Street outsiders who made a fortune predicting the sub-prime mortgage crisis and subsequent financial crash. If you watch the film, and you’re not too busy deciding whether it’s Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt or [...]
China: The end of dreams and the return of sanity January 25, 2016 Perhaps the most debilitating of all human emotions is disillusionment, for it marks the death of fond hopes, the painful recognition that dreams will simply not come to pass. It is this feeling – as much as any hard empirical data – that is driving the present market crisis in China, where not one but [...]