What a surprise, said Martin Vander Weyer in The Sunday Telegraph: the Government’s Small Business Service is a waste of money. According to the National Audit Office, the SBS (which controls an annual £2.6bn for …
Red tape strangles Britain
Category: Economy
Kondratieff wave theory: is it any use?
What is a Kondratieff wave? It is the central concept in a controversial but intermittently fashionable theory of economic history, which holds that major capitalist economies tend to grow, boom, bust and grow again in …
Heating Up This Summer
While cloudy skies continued to hang over Tokyo though half of July has already passed, weather authorities predict that the summer will be on par with a normal year or even hotter once the rainy …
What Next For 2005?
After April’s rocky start, equities spent the bulk of the quarter in recovery mode, although the path to redemption was not always straightforward. For the quarter, the S&P500 was flat, the Nikkei225 slightly negative, while …
The truth behind the City rich list
Reading the latest Sunday Times City rich list reminds one of the old 1920s Wall Street joke about the broker who took a client from out of town on a tour of downtown Manhattan. At …
Debt, Delusion and Deception
Due to higher inflation, higher short-term rates and compound interest, ever-increasing amounts of credit are required to maintain their effects on spending and asset prices. Signs of a slowing global economy are abounding, led everywhere …
China’s Rebalancing Tactic
China’s long-awaited shift in currency policy is an important milestone on the road to global rebalancing. Yes, the initial 2% renminbi revaluation was small, and, in and of itself, will accomplish very little. But this …
Higher-Skilled Feel Competitive Pressure
Inflation is the bogeyman that others use to frighten you into making bad investments. It’s about as likely to return as the gold standard. Year after year, the experts (or nearly all of them) tell …
The Struggle to Dodge Deflation
The digitization of information and near-free international telecommunication mean it’s now commercially feasible to shift large amounts of service activity from high-cost countries to low-cost ones with their abundance of young, highly-educated, adaptable workers, hungry …
Can the Bank of England Save the UK Economy?
If the Bank of England has done its sums correctly, last week’s 0.25% rate cut “is likely to be the last,” said Edward Hadas on Breakingviews.com. In its quarterly inflation report, the bank scaled back …