How to boost GDP and demolish debt with one radical policy March 5, 2014 HOW DO you discombobulate a banker? Ask them whether a fully reserved banking system – in other words, ending high street banking as we know it, by forcing banks to back their liabilities 100 per cent with reserves – could significantly improve our long-term prosperity. After the financial crisis, prominent economists like Laurence Kotlikoff argued [...]
Resist temptation: A sugar tax won’t make us healthy March 5, 2014 THE RECENT suggestion by the chief medical officer Sally Davies that “we may need to introduce a sugar tax” is a tribute to the extraordinary media profile of Action on Sugar, the latest pressure group to blame a single ingredient for people being overweight. Previous targets include saturated fat and salt, but it is now [...]
Letters to the Editor – 05/03 – End of the BBC, Ukraine crisis risks, Best of Twitter March 4, 2014 End of the BBC [Re: How technology has doomed the BBC licence fee, yesterday] If we make the BBC a pay-per-view service, there will be greater scope for selling programmes outside the UK than is currently the case. There must be thousands of hours of BBC programming (both current and historic) that non UK residents [...]
How the West should best the crumbling Kremlin March 4, 2014 AN UNLIKELY source holds the key to how the West should respond to Russia’s takeover of the Crimea. While researching for my book Ethical Realism (which I co-wrote with the rightly celebrated Anatol Lieven), I came across a startling fact. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the US’s best-known twentieth-century political thinkers, was also the author of [...]
French invasion heralds the collapse of tax and spend March 4, 2014 PIMLICO Plumbers will be a familiar brand to many readers – it has a prominent advert on the approach into Waterloo station. But the company is now calling for plumbers who are fluent in both English and French, and says applicants will be interviewed by a native French speaker. This is just the tip of [...]
Memo to the City: It’s time to invest March 4, 2014 FOLLOWING the devastating financial crisis of 2008, it’s easy to understand why there was a severe drop in business investment. From peak to trough, this vital part of economic life plummeted some 30 per cent. Since 2010, the government has been committed to helping the nation recover from the economic heart attack. By forming the [...]
Letters to the Editor – 04/03 – Ukraine crisis, Best of Twitter March 3, 2014 Ukraine crisis [Re: Russia’s Ukraine attack is end of Pax Americana, yesterday] A missile defence umbrella would represent a pointless and long-term burden, and is unlikely to restrain future Russian expansionism. The US and Europe are widely regarded as militarily incapable, and the expenditure of lives and money in Iraq and Afghanistan has proven a [...]
Why Britain’s new banking standards body needs your help March 3, 2014 REGULATORS can punish wrongdoing, but they find it much harder to legislate for what constitutes good behaviour. If they try to do so, they are likely to end up with massive rule books – and fail to meet their objectives. Rather than taking responsibility for their own actions and exercising their judgement, people will tend [...]
How technology has doomed the BBC licence fee March 3, 2014 WE SHOULD expect to hear much more about the future of the BBC in the next few months. Its Royal Charter is due for renewal in 2016, and there have already been murmurings about the sustainability of the licence fee model. Last year, Conservative party chairman Grant Shapps suggested the BBC needed to clean up [...]
There’s a cost to doing nothing in Ukraine March 3, 2014 IN RESPONSE to Russian forces entering the Crimea, the interim Ukrainian government called for UK and US intervention, invoking the undertakings we (and the French, and latterly Nato) gave to protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Yesterday, William Hague went to Kiev to tell the Ukrainians to their faces that we’re not coming – “no military options [...]