Decoding the protests occupying Wall Street October 6, 2011 AMERICA’S left may finally have found its answer to the Tea Party. Over the last four weeks, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has gone from a local curiosity to a national phenomenon, with copycat protests in several cities across the US, including Washington DC. In a sure sign that it is being taken more [...]
RAPID RESPONSES October 6, 2011 Inflexible traders As your Q&A on Monday said, the London transport system is going to struggle to cope during the Olympics and most businesses are going to look at ways for employees to work remotely. But City traders are one of those increasingly rare professional groups whose remote working practices are restricted. One of the [...]
Estonia’s lesson for Britain: Cut now and cut hard if you don’t want worse pain later October 5, 2011 WOULD you like to live in a country with a budget surplus, a 21 per cent flat tax rate, that grew at an annual rate of 8.4 per cent in the last quarter led by manufacturing, has almost no government debt and is planning to spend 20 per cent of its budget on capital spending? [...]
A Prime Minister on auto-cue blind to the big picture October 5, 2011 THE joke doing the rounds in the Manchester conference hall yesterday was this: is David Cameron following Plan C or Plan D? The wags weren’t referring to the government’s deficit reduction strategy, but rather the fact that the Prime Minister was forced to rewrite his speech after early extracts, released to the press on Tuesday [...]
UK bank rules need to be taken Europe-wide October 5, 2011 SAYING “I wouldn’t start from here” is not a very helpful response to a traveller asking directions, but sometimes it is the best one. It is good news for London that the chancellor managed to force concessions on EU derivatives legislation. He entered the negotiations in Luxembourg outnumbered 26 to 1, but achieved most of [...]
RAPID RESPONSES October 5, 2011 Exemplary ETFs BlackRock calls for high standards on disclosure for Exchange-traded fund (ETF) providers. We agree. That will only codify exactly what is already being delivered by the ETF community. ETFs have built an exemplary track record of delivering on straightforward performance objectives in a highly transparent and liquid environment. Michael John Lytle, Managing Director, [...]
Why Albert Einstein might have been wrong after all and why this really matters October 4, 2011 IT’S the reason the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars has to make the jump into hyperspace and the reason passengers on the Golgafrincham B Ark are in suspended animation in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Every author dealing with space travel has to work with or around Einstein’s speed limit. Nothing goes faster than [...]
Credit easing a sign that crisis worries Tories October 4, 2011 THE Eurozone crisis deepens by the day. Britain looks on, waiting for the nuclear fall-out that is sure to follow the explosion. Increasingly, I suspect the “credit easing” plan announced by the chancellor on Monday is a clear signal that the UK government expects things to get much, much worse. Ostensibly designed to help small [...]
The deadweight of the money-go-round October 4, 2011 WHAT will the government do to promote economic growth? I wish everyone would stop asking this question. It encourages politicians to “do something”; it encourages them to “deliver”. Yet the best way the chancellor George Osborne could promote growth is to stop delivering. Nothing that can be supplied privately should be supplied by the government [...]
RAPID RESPONSES October 4, 2011 Negative feedback We are all used to flare-ups of the sovereign debt crisis, but this time it is threatening to engulf the banking sector. Dexia brought back fears of 2008. The problem is that the banks in the need of most state-help tend to be based in countries with troubled finances. It is easy to [...]