Home Information Packs – Hips – were introduced as the housing market turned down, but it would be wrong to blame them for the house price slump. And it would be equally wrong for the Conservative Party to scrap them just because they were a Labour idea.
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Instead of shackling lenders, the reform of the mortgage market should concentrate on regulating borrowers. They were just as greedy and ignorant but liable to lose much more than the banks.
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Most businessmen will react to the revelations of MPs expenses with anger, cynicism or wry amusement. But how many could survive public exposure of their own expenses claims?
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I don’t know what the definition is of insider-dealing in Sunderland, but in the City it means trading shares with privileged information. It doesn’t mean writing newspaper stories that move share prices.
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Forget Madoff. The biggest ponzi scheme of recent years has been the world housing market.
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If Britain had wanted to adopt America’s Chapter 11 insolvency regime it would have incorporated it in the Enterprise Act of 2002. Instead, when the bankruptcy process was changed we took the best parts of the US system and rejected the rest.

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To describe the UK government’s latest proposed legislation on discrimination as a dogs’ dinner should not be taken as referring only to male canines. Or to suggest that other animals will not be fed either. But the proposals make a mess messier, however well-meant.

Those groups that have been discriminated against in past generations are to be compensated by being put at the front of the queue for jobs. The idea that discrimination is the best way to counter discrimination highlights the muddled thinking.

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Governments always fight the last economic battle that they lost. So today the sole target the Bank of England is told to hit is to control inflation lest we have a re-run of the 1970s or 1980s when prices rose by well over 20 per cent annually.

Before that the government lodestar was one of the monetary growth measures such as M4, and prior to that it was the balance of payments and the value of the pound that dictated policy to avoid a repeat the 1960s-style runs on the pound.

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Fines of €1.7bn may be as financially insignificant to mighty Microsoft as a parking fine but the US computer software group is fighting the EU’s penalties with the determination of a motorist who knows he is right – even if he also knows that the odds are loaded in favour of the system.

Microsoft is appealing against the record €899m fine imposed in February for alleged anti-competitive practices. That was on top of €497m penalty imposed in 2004 and the €281m that followed two years later.

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Some organisations – government, bodies like the Bank of England and even a few companies – keep a register of hospitality received by their employees. Lord Woolf’s report on (and for) BAE Systems suggests a log of gifts given.

The former Lord Chief Justice was asked to produce his report because BAE’s critics think gifts are a synonym for bribes.

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