Savage cuts are the safer option

If John Maynard Keynes were alive today, he would be appalled at the disastrous state of our public finances. He is loved and hated in equal measure as the man who made pump-priming during downturns intellectually respectable. But nothing he ever wrote could be used to justify the scandalous mess in which Gordon Brown has landed Britain.

Not only has Keynes been body-snatched by advocates of big state spending, but he finds himself in the battleground for the next general election. At Labour’s conference next week, the Prime Minister will say that Labour must be re-elected precisely because it will...

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Dr Greenspan’s defence: ‘It really wasn’t my fault’

‘I feel bribed,’ said Dr Alan Greenspan in a soft voice. It had been a bit like a dinner party game. What do you give the world’s greatest living exponent of capitalism? The answer, according to his ever-helpful office: a box of rather swish dark chocolates.

We were seated in the panelled boardroom of the offices that Greenspan Associates share with a hedge fund in Washington DC. It was a rare chance to discuss (for a BBC document-ary) the causes and consequences of the great economic upheaval with the man who oversaw America’s economy for almost two decades. The former...

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Time to break the fat cats’ cartel

A few months ago I appeared on a panel organised by a leading firm of pay consultants, Hewitt New Bridge. The audience, in the City, was packed with ‘human resources’ directors, pay experts and members of ‘remuneration committees’ — the directors who set pay in leading public companies — among whom there was broad acceptance that the current ‘Great Recession’ might require some kind of temporary pay restraint.

But when I suggested that remuneration committees were lazy, easily bullied by powerful chief executives (such as former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin) and too often cosy cartels where...

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Any Other Business

The £10 billion bid for Cadbury by Kraft Foods, Inc of the US has provoked little protest — other than from the chocolate maker itself, which says it would rather remain a ‘pure-play confectionery business’ than become a component of Kraft’s ‘low-growth conglomerate’. The fight will come down to price, sentimental factors such as history and culture swiftly forgotten. Cadbury, in its model village of Bourneville on the edge of Birmingham, used to be an icon of progressive Quakerism in business. Now, with its workforce shrunken and its ‘Bourneville’ brand made in France, it’s a modern company like any other,...

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Murdoch’s right: the BBC will destroy its news rivals

A Guardian survey published last Friday showed that eight out of ten members of the public backed the BBC against its detractors. The opinion poll was commissioned in response to a wide-ranging attack on the corporation by James Murdoch, son of Rupert and chief executive of News Corporation for Europe and Asia. In his MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh television festival at the end of last month, he had accused the BBC of a ‘land grab’, adding: ‘The scale and scope of its current activities and future ambitions is chilling.’

Now, I hold no brief for Mr Murdoch. And he...

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The dark heart of India’s economic rise

The first sign of illicit industry in the West Bengal district of Raniganj is the number of bicycles wobbling precariously down its village tracks, their panniers piled to an improbable height with coal. Then there are bullock carts and the occasional truck, all carrying the same cargo.

At New Kenda Colliery, one of the underground mines owned by Coal India, the state coal monopoly, it becomes obvious where it’s all coming from. A couple of dozen blackened villagers squat over a coal stockpile the size of a football pitch, filling sack after sack by hand as a guard gazes...

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