Monthly Archives: January 2010

Today we are asked if we should abolish the fixed age of retirement. The answer is “Yes” and “No”. The answer is “Yes”, because people should not be made to retire at a fixed age against their wishes. If they and their employers want to carry on with the contract, or if they wish to [...]

I fail to see how anyone can claim that the Fed or the Bank of England have been well run in recent years. We have just lived through the biggest boom and bust in money policy we have ever seen. The two main Central Banks that caused the blow up and then supervised the collapse [...]

The President’s wish to split off hedge funds, proprietary trading and venture capital from utility banking on the High Street could be done. If he just tries to do it in one country, even a large and powerful country like the USA, the mega banks will simply shift their ownership of these areas elsewhere in [...]

I have been asked what I think of Mr Obama’s comments on bank regulation. I think they are good modern politics. For Mr Obama, it was bash or be bashed. The US public – like the UK public – were not happy that so much of their money was tossed into propping up banks, or [...]

A few years ago the world’s four largest economies were the USA, Japan, Germany and the UK. We have long warned readers of the UK’s spectacular fall from grace, which is still continuing. The UK is now in seventh place and still declining. The sharp sell off in sterling last year, allied to the contraction [...]

Yesterday in the Commons during the debate on the deficit reduction I warned the government again about rising interest rates. I tried to explain to them that if they persist with huge borrowings and so much overspending, it will drive interest rates higher, damaging the recovery in the private sector. I explained that the markets [...]

This week the government announced prices are going up by 3.8% a year before the VAT increase, excluding mortgages, or by 2.9% on its preferred measure of the CPI. Most commentators think that will rise again in January. Meanwhile the Council leaders announced there would be no pay increases this year. That means local government [...]

Many of Cadbury’s shareholders who will shortly vote to sell their company are overseas individuals and institutions. In this gobal world one group of overseas shareholders will sell to a new group of overseas shareholders. It is not quite as some present it. The Cadbury family ceased to own and control it years ago. As [...]

Mr Blanchflower resigned from the Monetary Policy Committee. He now thinks it should be abolished because it did not agree with him whilst he was on it, and may soon disagree with him again. Readers of this blog will know that I too have been constantly critical of the various calls the MPC have made, [...]