Glad that's settled then

Every now and again Will Hutton can surprise me by making a statement that is both useful and true.

This is not the end of capitalism, as some wildly claim; there is no intellectual, social or political challenge to a market system based on respect for private property rights....

Quite, we only have to look at the wreckage of those economies that don't have either markets or property rights to see that.

One might go further indeed: there's no logical challenge to such a system either.

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Mark Lynas

I have to admit thatI hugely enjoyed this article about Mark Lynas.

Except, well, I don’t believe that any more. Just a month ago I had a Damascene conversion: the Green case against nuclear power is based largely on myth and dogma. My tipping point came when I discovered just how much nuclear power has changed since I first set my mind against it.

Actually, very little has changed about nuclear power since he first set his mind against it. For example:

And those dangers? They’re still there but we need to discuss them truthfully. Take Chernobyl....

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The calm before the storm?

It's definitely not just stocks: the credit markets have failed to deteriorate today as everybody expected them to, on the day after the largest banking collapse in US history. Libor's down a little, TED's down a lot, and generally there's no sign at all of any panic.

Justin Fox has a few theories for why this might be the case. The first one is the least likely: basically, that John McCain is right when he says that "there has been significant progress toward a bipartisan agreement" on the bailout. The...

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Daily Brief

A Wall Street financial whiz -- described as an unassuming mentor -- has pleaded guilty to a million-dollar insider trading scheme, the Department of Justice announced.

John F. Marshall, a principal at Marshall Tucker & Associates, and a well-known professor of finance and economics at several business schools in the New York City area, filed in the plea in federal court in Manhattan.

Marshall, who lives in Stony Brook, New York, served on the executive committee of the International Securities Exchange, a Manhattan-based options and stock exchange. As a result, he learned that the exchange was planning a...

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Blogs are illegal

Well, that's the lesson to be drawn from this little article.

Italy has a law on the books stating that newspapers must have a licence. That law has been extended (in one case so far, to be sure) to a blog. As it had a headline, thus it was a newspaper and as it didn't have a licence the proprietor was fined (and could have been jailed).

But that's Italy, right, nothing to do with us?

Ah, not so fast. It's a firm principle of English (and other Common Law jurisdictions) law that on the internet publication takes place...

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