Should capital expenditure be the first corporate cut or the last thing to go? Investment in plant or buildings is the basis for tomorrow’s profits, but delaying it is an easy way to boost today’s cashflow.
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The Conservatives should not chide Labour for selling the family silver at the wrong time: the party that invented privatisations sold a stream of state assets at low prices when it was in government. And Gordon Brown has twice called the market correctly in raising billions of pounds of capital from the private sector.
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Getting your insurance company to give you the money to pay its premium is a clever wheeze, but that’s what Lloyds Banking Group is planning. If it finances its participation in the government’s bad-debt insurance scheme with a rights issue, the state, as largest shareholder, will have to stump up the biggest part of the £16bn cost.
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Preventing a popular company from growing is an odd way to serve the consumer, but that is what the Competition Commission is doing in restricting Tesco’s expansion to give less popular supermarkets a better chance to expand.
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It’s not only when new economic figures are better than the old that we know we’re past the worst, it’s when the old figures are revised so that they’re not as bad as they were.
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F1 needs Renault like the public sector needs big building companies.
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Every user of the National Health Service should be presented with a bill as they leave their doctors’ surgery, chemists’ shop or hospital. They would not have to pay it - that’s how the NHS works - but it would make them appreciate the value of the service.
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Fancy that: governments are poor at picking winners! Why then do they keep trying? Even now, a fund manager is being sought to invest another £150m of taxpayers’ money.
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Lord Sugar’s new assistant Karren Brady, chief executive of Birmingham City football club, may become as famous as the entrepreneur and TV star himself, but neither present a representative picture of British business. Yet what other corporate leaders could the general public recognize, either by name or face?
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Sending half our school-leavers to university may have looked an admirable objective but the consequence is a supply of graduates that exceeds demand. If a giant like BT wants no more degree-holders, why should other companies?
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