The Eurozone will implode, but it isn’t too late to learn from past monetary unions February 1, 2012 FOR a long time it was taboo to suggest the Eurozone would collapse – now people write and talk of little else. Currency break-up is inevitable, but despite the twists and turns a workable solution isn’t in sight. Although it’s impossible to predict the precise outcome, previous monetary unions offer insights into what went wrong [...]
Apprenticeships in Britain plainly have not worked February 1, 2012 POLITICIANS faced by persistent social problems often dream of reviving old institutions. Youth unemployment in Britain recently passed 1m. No surprise, then, that historical solutions are being proposed for the UK’s present day problems with youth training. Politicians of all stripes believe that increasing access to apprenticeships will turn those young people not in employment, [...]
Romney will be hoping victory comes swiftly February 1, 2012 IT COST Mitt Romney approximately $16m to win Florida’s 50 delegates. The one thing he couldn’t afford in Florida was defeat. But Romney didn’t just come back from a double-digit poll deficit – he did something much more impressive. Newt Gingrich remarked that a strong second would save his “totally unique” campaign. With a landslide [...]
RAPID RESPONSES February 1, 2012 A critical state George Osborne commented on the loss of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood by stating “RBS came to symbolise everything that went wrong in the British economy in the last decade”. This is a perplexing statement from the man charged with sorting out the public finances. The years of artificially low interest rates that provided [...]
Join our campaign to fight fund managers’ high fees and lack of transparency January 31, 2012 IT IS time to give investors a better deal. That is why SCM Private – the wealth managers of which I am a partner – is today launching a campaign proposing a True and Fair Code and Universal Labelling system for all UK investment products. Through this scheme consumers would, for the first time, have [...]
Being a company director is now a high risk gamble January 31, 2012 WITH the debate on executive pay raging, the wider question that everyone should be asking is: Why would anyone want to be a director in the first place? Over time, directors’ duties have been aggressively extended and however well they do their job, directors are at risk of criminal and other serious liabilities quite apart [...]
Please Dave, don’t try to make me happier January 31, 2012 THERE is more to life than money. It is an unusually dull or materialistic child who does not eventually light upon this idea. And his money-grubbing old parents must then hear all about it. Listening to banal revelations is a price of associating with children. They can be forgiven. When you are new yourself, it [...]
RAPID RESPONSES January 31, 2012 California dreams Although I wish Alan Bristow and David Miller were right in predicting that UK companies will be able to compete with the likes of Apple and Google (UK tech industry is positioned for a global challenge, yesterday), in reality we are woefully unprepared to take on the behemoths of Silicon Valley. Autonomy – [...]
Devastating pensions crisis requires companies to take a more inventive approach January 30, 2012 DEFINED benefit (DB) pension schemes are rarely out of the news these days – the latest headlines being from Shell, which has become the last of Britain’s biggest companies to scrap its final salary scheme for new entrants. And while the death of DB – which has been predicted from as far back as 2004, [...]
UK tech sector is positioned for a global challenge January 30, 2012 BY THE end of this year, the US technology company Apple could see its cash reserves outstrip those of the US government. While the UK hasn’t yet produced an equivalent, there are signs that technology might be the key sector in Britain’s future. Last year, the sector outperformed the broader equity markets, with investors being [...]