Banks must green up their act, for the sake of both planet and profit November 3, 2017 If you watch a TV ad for a UK high street bank these days, they are full of soft focus, half-speed footage of smiling, tanned pensioners vigorously enjoying their retirement, or shots of attractive young families surrounded by nature – all portraying vague notions of stability and future prosperity. But a new report from the [...]
Think locally, invest globally: Why Brexit isn’t the calamity some fear November 1, 2017 A year after the Brexit vote, the UK has managed to avoid a bear market and recession. Still, global diversification remains a key tool for investors. Fifteen months after Brits voted to leave the EU, the UK government is slowly ploughing ahead with Brexit. Invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty in March was the [...]
Catalonia tries to avoid repeating history, but Spain has economic reality on its side November 1, 2017 Karl Marx famously wrote: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”. The phrase might well have been coined with Catalonia in mind. Generalissimo Franco began a military coup against the elected Spanish government in the Canary Islands in 1936. The battle spread across Spain, and Catalonia was the last redoubt of the Republic [...]
Let’s scrap stamp duty and stop exacerbating the housing crisis October 30, 2017 Often when we talk about taxes, we just weigh out how much they raise and who pays, and assume any change is about handing out cash to a favoured group. But this is misguided. Some taxes distort the economy far more than others for every pound they raise for the Treasury. By this measure, stamp [...]
A successful industrial strategy requires letting zombie firms die October 20, 2017 As the government considers its industrial strategy white paper, due later this year, it must first break free from blinkered thinking. While doubtless well intentioned, the familiar policies under discussion so far – additional public infrastructure investment, more state-funded research, and skills enhancement, with a particular focus on management training – are not sufficient to [...]
Google parent Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs building its own smart city in Toronto. But why not London next? October 18, 2017 Google’s parent company Alphabet is building its own city, where it will tackle some of the most pressing issues facing London: urban growth, energy use, housing costs, and transportation. But it’s the Canadian city of Toronto where 800 acres of waterfront space will be built “from the internet up” by the tech giant, not the [...]
How to solve the housing crisis in five years October 4, 2017 The UK housing market is failing millions of people. It produces far too few homes, and then offers them at unaffordable rents and prices. Yet we could cure this national housing crisis in just five years, using high-technology modular construction, reimagined council housing and patient institutional capital. In Japan, the modular future has already arrived. [...]
Exclusive: Hard Brexit will lead to Operation Stack-level queues on a daily basis, claims British Ports Association boss September 7, 2017 A hard Brexit could lead to Operation Stack-level queues on a daily basis, the chief executive of the British Ports Association has said. Richard Ballantyne told City A.M. that ports on both sides of the Channel faced extreme lorry tailbacks, akin to those that caused chaos in 2015 during the Calais migrant crisis, if no [...]
The London Stock Exchange is shrinking: Why the capital needs to float more IPO boats August 29, 2017 Something strange is happening to London’s equity market. In a word, it is shrinking. Steadily, but surely, and over a long period of time. This threatens to have long-term financial and economic consequences for all of us. This may surprise you since on the face of it everything looks rosy. The FTSE 100 is sitting [...]
The global financial crisis 10 years on: six charts that tell the story July 31, 2017 It is hard to believe but it is 10 years since the start of the global financial crisis. Triggered by a collapse in the US housing market it caused the deepest recession in living memory and the near-collapse of the financial system. Banks failed, government institutions were bailed out, stockmarkets crashed and countries had to [...]