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11 December 2012
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The non-stop tide of new regulation from the government continues. It now appears to be preparing to accept an amendment to the Financial Services Bill, which will allow the Financial Conduct...
20 November 2012
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‘The philosopher's stone is a legendary alchemical substance said to be capable of turning base metals into gold.… Efforts to discover the philosopher's stone were known as the...
9 November 2012
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Earlier this week, a group of leading academics called for a revolution in financial regulation. This call came after the publication of a group of papers examining regulation across every field of...
16 October 2012
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‘If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it.’
This famous quote by Ronald Reagan was meant to be a summary of governments...
20 September 2012
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Patrick McLoughlin and Michael Gove are competent and well-thought-of Secretaries of State. As Conservatives, they presumably assert from time to time generalities about the virtues of...
12 September 2012
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They say that laws are like sausages, it is better not to see how they are made. If so, the 2005 Gambling Act was of the supermarket own-brand, ‘sixteen for a pound’ variety. It began...
5 July 2012
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The spotlight in the Libor rate-fixing scandal has moved. Questions are being asked about the culpability of the FSA, which may well have ignored repeated warnings about Libor calculations from...
29 June 2012
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This week a major scandal came to light with regard to the setting of LIBOR, which is the interest rate at which banks lend to each other. It would appear that this rate, which is a useful index of...
11 June 2012
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2008 represented something of a milestone for Britain’s charity sector as it was the year in which it received more money from government than from individuals. This was emblematic of the...
14 May 2012
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There are lots of good arguments against positive discrimination, be it through female quotas for company boards, quota systems in political institutions, affirmative action or otherwise. For a...
9 May 2012
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On 23 January 1912, representatives from twelve nations signed the International Opium Convention, which contracted them to ‘use their best endeavours to control, or to cause to be controlled...
20 April 2012
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I have received quite a bit of feedback for my recent paper, ‘Abundance of land, shortage of housing’, and would like to respond to those comments that were both critical and thoughtful...
14 February 2012
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David Cameron’s trip to the Nordic-Baltic conference seems to have reinforced his view that companies should be pressurised into putting women on their boards. At present he favours Lord...
13 February 2012
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The IEA’s 2010 monograph Does Britain Need a Financial Regulator? argued, amongst other things, that the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has been guilty of overreach and empire building....
9 February 2012
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The Australian government recently decided to homogenise tobacco products by forcing them into uniform packaging. A key question is whether ‘public health’ provides sufficient grounds...
30 January 2012
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In August 2010, the IEA published Does Britain Need a Financial Regulator? Written by Professor Philip Booth and myself, with a particular focus on stock exchanges around the world, our conclusion...
24 January 2012
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Vince Cable’s proposals on executive pay do not really amount to a great deal, but it is worrying that the coalition now seems to have firmly accepted that top pay in the private sector is...
12 January 2012
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My last blog post was on recycling so I guess it is appropriate if I recycle some material from an old blog post to deal with Nick Clegg’s latest attack on the 'it’s not...
9 January 2012
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The Prime Minister says that the government intends to act on what it sees as excessive executive pay. Apparently we “can’t tell people what they should be paid but (should act) where...
5 January 2012
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The Christmas-to-New Year holiday was a bad period for those of us who believe in deregulation. A minimum price for alcohol was proposed; a massive extension of state funding and regulation of...
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