If employers cannot make staff retire at 65, will they have to make redundancy payments to force them to go? If so, few will leave voluntarily: they’ll hang on for the windfall payout.
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The Financial Services Authority will not only lose bank supervision under the government’s shake-up of regulation, it is likely to lose its role monitoring listed companies. And the winner will be the Financial Reporting Council, making this little-known body the country’s most powerful corporate regulator.
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Choosing chief executives from a pool of internal candidates with decades of experience at the company may look like good succession planning but BP Plc (LON:BP) has proved yet again that it does not always work. Tony Hayward is the oil company’s third chief executive to tick all those boxes but who has been forced out.
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Vince Cable certainly thinks outside the box. After the mansion tax and graduate tax, the business secretary is now mooting allowing banks to pay bonuses only if they lend. But what can look like creative thinking from an Opposition politician can be plain daft from a government minister.
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Until now, Ocado has been an online supplier of groceries in vans with a high reputation. Now it is a stockmarket vehicle with a bad reputation. Will the poor opinion of Ocado in the City affect its performance in the country?
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The 25th anniversary of Live Aid is being used as an example of how generous people can be in supporting good causes. Nonsense: the concerts were all about commerce, not charity – self interest rather than selfless philanthropy.
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The first rule of cornering a market – cocoa beans or anything else – is not to take delivery. It means the speculator has to pay in full and then pay again to store the commodity in warehouses. And a soft commodity such as cocoa beans deteriorates.
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The easiest money to spend is always other peoples’. Prime minister David Cameron has thus decided to raid private bank accounts to fund his Big Society concept of volunteering.
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When Britain’s biggest investor speaks it is worth listening. But the message from Legal & General Group Plc (LON:LGEN) is gloomy: the chancellor has got it wrong, it is too early to apply the brakes, and we’re heading back towards recession.

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Limiting a primary school headmaster’s pay – or any other public servants’ salary – to less than the prime minister’s £142,000 remuneration has a popular appeal to the majority who are paid below that figure, but it is a crude form of wage restraint that will backfire.
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