Economy

“Why would someone lend money to a borrower with the certainty of getting less money back at a future date?” That’s the question posed by Bill Gross from Janus Capital group in his March newsletter to investors.  Comparing the contemporary state of the banking industry to the state of the …

The end of last week saw a flurry of stories about how banks were conning the public into thinking that “free banking” was really free.  Andrew Tyrie MP, chair of the Treasury Select Committee noted that there is no such thing as free banking, “it is not just misleading; it …

When they were elected with a small majority in May 2015, Tory ministers salivated at the prospect of generating a hydraulic fracturing (fracking) boom similar to the one in the USA.  It was meant to be a win-win.  The Bullingdon Boys and their chums in The City could get rich …

Beyond the obvious – that these are all proposed low carbon alternatives to fossil fuel – they are evidence of the failure of privatisation.  This is particularly obvious in the UK, where decades of over-zealous privatisation have led to a short-term focus on customer prices at the expense of future energy …

The heady pre-crash days of 2007 were the last time bank CEOs emerged to tell an unsuspecting public that all was well.  Within months, of course, banks and financial companies were falling like dominos and Western finance ministers were desperately looking for a means of preventing a financial meltdown.  The …

One of the ways you know that you are dealing with a religion is when the priests reject evidence because it conflicts with the model of how the world is meant to be.  Indeed, history is littered with the corpses of apostates, blasphemers and heretics who had the temerity to …

The G20 meeting in Shanghai has started with a round of finger pointing as it becomes clear that the policies put in place in the wake of the 2008 banking crash have failed to deliver the promised global economic growth. With the International Monetary Fund sounding alarm bells about the …

Shares falling, CEOs taking huge bonuses, fears about bad debt and cascading bank failures, and senior bankers coming out to tell us (“trust me, I’m a banker”) that they do not have liquidity problems… it’s 2008 all over again.  And the UK banks have been taking liberties recently according to the …

French energy giant EDF has called for a radical shake up of the European Union energy market in order to increase generating capacity and to facilitate the transition to low-carbon energy. The current EU energy market was set up to encourage competition between suppliers to keep consumer prices low.  However, …

The benefit – and curse – of being an oil producing state is that you can be profligate without facing the economic consequences.  In Russia, for example, income from the vast Caspian and Siberian oil and gas fields has obviated the need for income tax.  In Alaska, the state government has …