The 2012 Baker Bill: a programme to end financial crises
byEarlier today Conservative Steve Baker MP put forward a Private Member’s Bill, the Financial Institutions (Reform) Bill, which outlines a programme of radical reforms…
February, 2012
My big fat Greek bailout
byGreece was bailed out for the second time in four months. Or did it default? Well, a bit of both, I guess. All bondholders…
Why do savers distrust the banks?
bySimon Rose and his colleagues at Save Our Savers are good friends of The Cobden Centre. Anyone doubting the rising concern of millions of…
The way forward for Greece
byLast Monday night, before the US markets opened after President’s Day, bailout terms for Greece were announced. The detail is secondary to assessing whether…
Old wine
byAs regular readers of these scribblings have hopefully come to appreciate, this is not the place to come to slake your thirst for mechanistic…
Reshaping risk-taking incentives
byThe evolution of banking as I have described it has satisfied the immediate demands of shareholders and managers, but has short-changed everyone else. There…
Simplicity – Grant Williams on gold
byFor anyone who is interested to understand what money is and what’s happening to it, I strongly recommend you listen to these two presentations.
Will the real Adam Smith please stand up
by“Adam Smith had one overwhelmingly important triumph: he put into the center of economics the systematic analysis of the behavior of individuals pursuing their…
The Great Repression
by“No government has ever commanded the resources at the disposal of our ungodly Leviathan, which consumes about 25% of the product of the world’s…
Gordon Kerr critiques the Greek bailout on Bloomberg
byI was glad to see Cobden Partners’ Gordon Kerr on Bloomberg yesterday, explaining why the Greek bailout will fail: As I wrote elsewhere, the…