The music stops for UK breaks on bankruptcies January 25, 2012 THE singer Kenny Rogers once sang “you’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run”. While Rogers was singing about a gambler, he could just as easily have been singing about the Irish people’s attitude to their bankruptcy regime. Increasingly the people [...]
There isn’t any debate: Voters want openness January 25, 2012 THIS bar stool observation from a stranger on Monday evening may well have nailed it. “I’d like to see Mitt Romney as my president, but I’d love to see Newt Gingrich debate Barack Obama.” Gingrich has something the Republican base values – combativeness, as well as a veneer of near-invincibility on the stage before a [...]
RAPID RESPONSES January 25, 2012 Reduce naked risk Jamie Whyte’s proposal for amending bankers’ pay structure [Strippers can show us bankers’ just rewards, yesterday] is certainly worth consideration but needs further refinement. In Whyte’s model the bank is still subject to losing large amounts of capital at the hands of its trader, whereas Stringfellow faces no such capital risk with [...]
It’s a fix: Coalition plans for Britain’s energy market are likely to boost fuel poverty January 24, 2012 OVER twenty years since Britain laid the groundwork for electricity privatisation and delivered the most liberalised electricity market in the world, the coalition’s new energy “market” reforms will artificially fix the price of electricity in an effort to support more wind energy and kick-start the building of new nuclear power stations. Top-down controls will distort [...]
Forget the Kate Effect: we need Maggie Power January 24, 2012 IT’S a very dreary landscape out there right now for retailers. Unless, of course, you happen to be one of the lucky few – Burberry is one such brand. It can do no wrong, it seems, and never less so than when the Duchess of Cambridge is seen sporting its togs. After being spotted wearing [...]
Strippers can show us bankers’ just rewards January 24, 2012 THE lap-dancers of Stringfellows, the West End strip club, have already rendered great service to the banking industry. But there is one more service they could provide. By their example, we could answer the questions – now also political issues – of how and how much investment bankers should be paid. Lap dancers receive performance-related [...]
RAPID RESPONSES January 24, 2012 On the money Per Kurowski is absolutely right [Holy moly: Banks were drugged by Basel’s rulebook, yesterday]: the reason for the evolution of the collateralised debt obligation (CDO) debacle and especially the emergence of the synthetic variety of this was that decision making was driven by an artificial “risk structure” for asset holdings propagated by [...]
Newt Gingrich is back from the political dead, and only Mitt Romney can stop him January 23, 2012 AS SOON as Newt Gingrich’s landslide win in South Carolina was announced by US networks, two ideas were put forward as gospel. Firstly, that this was an unexpected sensation – and secondly that, due to the vastness and expense of campaigning in the state, such a sensation would be impossible for him to repeat in [...]
Holy moly: Banks were drugged by Basel’s rulebook January 23, 2012 LET’S suppose that the human, fallible credit rating agencies produce ratings that are absolutely perfect in terms of measuring the risk of default; and that banks use these ratings to choose who to lend to, at what rates and under what conditions. But then let us add that bank regulators, such as those in the [...]
Liquidating false ideas of Austrian economics January 23, 2012 IN A recent article in the Daily Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argued that “policy defeatism is in the air, and Austro-liquidationists are winning the popular debate”. “Austro-liquidationists” is a neat slur, managing to damn Austrian economics as both terrifyingly extreme and stupefyingly technical at the same time. But Evans-Pritchard misrepresents the Austrian school, while also overestimating [...]