If the wheel’s been invented and is being ignored, there’s no harm in re-inventing it. So don’t knock Nick Clegg just because he is a latecomer to employee share-ownership.
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The latest downgrade of eurozone countries’ debt should make us ask just who are the world’s economic powerhouses. There are developed nations whose borrowings are now ranked as junk but emerging market countries with debt that is investment grade.
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HS2, the proposed high-speed rail route from London northwards, risks becoming blocked by Nimbies when it is the financial cost, not the environmental impact, that ought to be causing concern. If the benefits so obviously outweigh the £33bn cost, the private sector would be fighting to build it.
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The UK has become the magnate for libel tourism and the venue where foreigners settle their divorces, oligarchs argue commercial disputes and overseas visitors come for medical care. Britain really must not become the location of choice for international bankruptcy too.
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David Cameron is about to slay an imaginary dragon. He is perpetuating the myth that directors of one company set pay at another whose board members set the first director’s pay. The prime minister plans to ban a practice that does not happen but he thus risks devaluing his whole attack on unjustified pay.
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If David Cameron needs to make a political gesture on boardroom pay it is better that he gives shareholders the veto than allows workers to decide the directors’ remuneration.
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The one guaranteed outcome of the US Fed’s new policy of forecasting interest rates is that the forecasts will ultimately be wrong. And that will undermine the world’s most important financial policymaker.
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Companies are in no mood for mergers and acquisitions but the lack of takeover lack of activity risks leaving world business in a poorer state for the economic recovery.
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Will a royal Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games rescue the UK economy in 2012? David Cameron thinks (or maybe just hopes) so in his New Year’s message, but it’s big ask.
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If only governments had been as prudent as the corporate sector. Companies shored up their balance sheets as soon as they suspected the bubble might burst in 2007. That’s why they’re throwing off cash now.
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