The audacity of Barclays’ actions in seeking to manipulate LIBOR is not in doubt. The scandal, quite apart from exposing how odious and unethical some of Barclays’ business practices were under Bob Diamond, has exposed profound weaknesses in the microstructures of financial markets. These weaknesses should not come […]
Information on the performance of the private contractors responsible for delivering the Government’s Work Programme is beginning to leak out, seemingly despite the best efforts of the Department for Work and Pensions to keep us all in the dark. And the news is not good. It appears that […]
A few days ago I blogged some thoughts on Seeking the limits of the market, having just read Michael Sandel’s recent book What money can’t buy. One of Sandel’s key points is that the logic of the market is slowly and insidiously colonising more and more areas of […]
I’ve just finished reading Michael Sandel’s What money can’t buy: The moral limits of markets, a book which has attracted quite a bit of media attention. It is an important book. Its importance does not lie in its originality: many of its arguments already exist in the literature. […]
Last Wednesday Suzanne Moore posted a Guardian comment piece entitled Why do we take economists so seriously? which takes a rather scatter-gun approach to some familiar themes. The argument, in outline, is that the economy is in a mess and this is primarily because we have been hoodwinked […]
There was a bit of social media sniping yesterday that, despite David Cameron’s protestations to the contrary, the Queen’s Speech didn’t contain much of any substance to help the ailing UK economy. That doesn’t seem to me to be entirely fair, for two reasons. First, there were some […]
They’re not happy. The Tory Right are on manoeuvres. And the Lib Dems are in their sights. It seems that the grumbling and the finger-pointing are getting, well, a bit more pointed. In yesterday’s Express Paul O’Flynn’s column argues: “not only is the Lib Dem presence in the […]
On Wednesday the Institute of Economic Affairs discussion paper Abundance of land, shortage of housing, by Kristian Niemietz, was launched on to an unsuspecting world. The timing of this launch is intriguing. We are still trying to come to grips with the final version of the National Planning […]
Why is there a lot of talk about a mansion tax at the moment? The short, obvious answer is because the budget is imminent. Liberal Democrats have long held the belief that it is better to tax wealth than income. This position was reaffirmed at Spring Conference. A […]
[Originally posted at LSE British Politics and Policy, 01/03/12] Last week on the LSE British Politics and Policy Blog, Will Tanner argued that the government needs to change direction on public service reform. Tanner makes three points that flow from his frustration with progress. Mainly, he claims the […]
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