RAPID RESPONSES May 30, 2012 Agile office space [Re: London’s developers have a prime role in ensuring its future success, Tuesday] I couldn’t agree more with George Iacobescu’s assessment. It is vital for property developers to respond to changing business needs. However, greater property market flexibility could also be achieved by owners being open to new ways of making space available. [...]
Spanish regional profligacy sits as a worrying lesson to the Eurozone May 29, 2012 BEYOND the troubled banking sector, there is another potential problem on the Spanish horizon that could be instrumental in how the euro crisis develops: the central government’s relationship with the 17 Spanish regions, and particularly its ability to keep public spending at the regional level under control. The 1978 post-Franco constitution designed Spain as a [...]
I should have the right to quit a job without being sued for unfairly resigning May 29, 2012 AS AN undergraduate, I worked at a laundromat for a few months. Each Sunday I would spend 10 hours giving people tokens for the machines and doing “serviced washes”. This could be a nasty business because people occasionally dropped off clothes or bed sheets they had soiled on account of drinking too much the night [...]
Charities need to be innovative to beat tough times May 29, 2012 PUBLIC services are being opened up to a variety of providers. If you go swimming, social enterprise Greenwich Leisure Limited, not the council, may well be running the pool. Your rubbish is more likely to be collected by a private company. And if you have a relative in need of social care, then it’s likely [...]
As BP faces difficulty at its Russian venture, is the country a safe place for UK investors? May 29, 2012 YES John McRoberts There has always been concern around election time in Russia but, now that Vladimir Putin is again President, I expect another period of stability. He has transformed the country, putting in place a new environment for business, built primarily on transforming the tax system. Personal income tax is now a flat 13 [...]
RAPID RESPONSES May 29, 2012 Support start ups [Re: Cheap money and more debt won’t help the young, yesterday] While I sympathise with Philip Salter’s concerns about taxpayers’ money being thrown at the government’s start-up loan scheme, some budding entrepreneurs will always need loans. I’d prefer that private lenders provide these loans, but for some reason this is not happening. I’m [...]
London’s developers have a prime role in ensuring its future success May 28, 2012 IF LONDON is to retain its status as a global capital for business in the face of technological revolution and the rise of mega cities in the South and East of the globe, it is vital for property developers to respond to changing business needs. This is not just building new offices that are well [...]
Central banks have plenty of ammo but there’s confusion on how they fire May 28, 2012 WHEN economic crises strike it can take a while for economists to keep up. But one of the confusing outcomes of events since 2008 has been policymakers presenting established policies – such as what is now being called quantitative easing (QE) – as being novel, and policymakers and commentators using different terms to mean the [...]
Cheap money and more debt won’t help the young May 28, 2012 OVER the next three years, £82m of taxpayers’ money – or debt, to be more precise – will be funnelled into a scheme to provide loans worth on average £2,500 to entrepreneurs aged 18 to 24. Cue politicians, business people and other sycophants tripping over themselves to be linked to this intrinsically popular policy. After [...]
Has the time come for military intervention to topple Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime? May 28, 2012 YES Michael Weiss Military intervention in Syria isn’t so much a matter of preference as an inevitability. The Kofi Annan plan has failed, and even Annan himself has stopped just short of saying so. Last Friday’s horrifying, state-orchestrated massacre of 116 people, including women and children, in the village of Houla proves that a “negotiated [...]