The little UK bank reporting season is over. £15Bn profits have been reported. Bonuses are being calculated. The time they took us all over the brink is becoming a distant memory, along with the ‘too big to fail’ mantra. Sir John Vickers’ commission on banking regulation won’t report for another twelve months and by then [...]
The hero of the free market philosophy is surely the entrepreneur, the one who has the entrepreneurial spirit to start from small beginnings and build something not only with their own sweat, blood and creativity, but also by putting their own money at risk. They control and own. Most of them fail but a few [...]
“The directors of … companies, being the managers of other people’s money rather than their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance … Negligence and profusion must always prevail … in the management of the affairs of such a company.” So wrote Adam Smith 250 [...]
Industry has always depended on credit. Without it we would not have had an industrial revolution. When Adam Smith described his pin factory which, through the division of labour, increased production from, at most, 20 pins per day per operative, to more than 48,000, all that was needed was a market for that massive increase [...]
Since the financial crash, and all the stuff about speculative financial markets, hedge funds, greedy bankers and their obscene bonuses for doing precious little of real worth, and then all the stuff about global warming, and BP’s poisoning the Gulf of Mexico … with all that going on it’s difficult to stand back and take [...]
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