politics, economy and employment & labour
I wish we would stop using the word Capitalism. It is a 19th-century term, derived from 19th-century economic philosophy. But today people who would run a mile from any suggestion that they had Marxist sympathies freely use the terminology of that era. In the 19th century, business was normally organised by and around the owner-proprietor. […]
I am Scottish, British and European and happy to remain so. I am, mostly, proud of all these things. I left Scotland more than 40 years ago, but there is still a lump in my throat when I return. A recent stay in the Netherlands — liberal, tolerant and defensive of its own culture — […]
Swiss voters decided in a referendum on June 5 whether to introduce a “basic income”. In proposed reforms to the social welfare system, all residents would be entitled to a guaranteed income of SFr30,000 ($30,275) a year from the state — unconditionally. The concept of basic income has been discussed for decades. It has attractions for people at both […]
The term “helicopter money” is derived from a vivid image created by the US economist Milton Friedman in which a central banker showers notes on a grateful populace. More recently, the notion has been promoted by Adair Turner, the former chairman of the UK financial regulator, in his book, Between Debt and the Devil. It has […]
Gordon Brown’s exchange with Gillian Duffy on the streets of Rochdale was a defining moment in the UK’s 2010 general election. It also revealed much about the evolution of political parties of the left in the past 50 years. Mrs Duffy told Mr Brown, then Labour prime minister, of her life-long commitment to his party […]
Poor Bernie Sanders. How can you expect to become US president if you are not familiar with the relative spheres of competence of the Federal Reserve and Treasury department in the supervision of the nation’s banks? If you are not au fait with the different roles of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and […]
This was to have been the year of exit from quantitative easing. Instead, 2016 is going to be the year of negative interest rates. For more than a decade we have been told that the world suffers from a glut of savings, resulting from the surpluses of Asian countries and Germany. The excess supply of capital […]
It is hard to imagine life without digital search and the internet. This is as true for me as for anyone else: the greater ease of obtaining and checking relevant facts and data has transformed the life of the columnist. Pulling books from library shelves and turning their pages was never an efficient search technique, […]
Shareholders own the corporation, and the duty of the directors to maximise shareholder value follows from that. I have lost count of the number of times I have been told “that is the law”. But it is not the law. Certainly not in America, as Lynn Stout, a professor at Cornell University Law School, has […]
Nothing illustrates more starkly the difference between the preoccupations of financial market participants and the needs of businesses and households than the subject of liquidity. Last week the Bank of England held an open forum to discuss what the financial sector contributes to the real economy, and I took part in a discussion on the […]
Last week I left home without my wallet. I soon realised it did not really matter. I could even manage without a plastic card. My phone can summon and pay for a taxi, buy a cup of coffee and purchase a train ticket. This year the proportion of transactions in Britain made in cash is likely to […]
When I was a schoolboy in Edinburgh in the 1960s, the head office of the Bank of Scotland was an imposing building on the Mound, the street that leads from Princes Street to Edinburgh Castle and the Royal Mile. The Royal Bank of Scotland, its arch-rival, occupied Dundas House, the finest property in the city’s […]
