Disappearing companies

JohnAnt

...which of course will not help the banks that lent to them, nor the suppliers to whom they owe money. Nor the client companies who paid them for orders they haven't met.
Could turn very nasty.

Nick Kaplan

On the bright side Schumpeter called this process 'creative destruction.' As the old, uncompetitive industries collapse, new dynamic ones will be rebuilt on the fertile ground of the post-recession landscape.... I hope....

JohnAnt

Nor will the enforcing of the EU Working Hours Directive do much to help already struggling UK companies. I have never run a company, but I have enormous sympathy with anyone trying to do so right here, right now. They have to cope with the blithe and solipsistic demands of staff for 'family-friendly' time off, maternity and paternity leave, career breaks, duvet days, sick leave, not to mention the automatic right to leave in mid-afternoon to collect children from school. They have to fund punitively augmented NICs and pension contributions, keep track of increasingly byzantine tax rules.
And now their staff may not work except to a rigid and limited weekly pattern, even if they are willing or even eager to work longer hours.
This will cost British business nearly £12 billion per year.
'David Cameron last week told his MPs that “Europe” doesn’t figure in the 10 issues that voters name as their top concerns.'*
Maybe we should start to let Dave know that it IS our uppermost concern.

*http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5028446/Working-hours-scandal-that-no-one-will-talk-about.html

Alf Tupper

Tell us something we don't know.

Recovering to what? All we hear is an exhortation to return to spending irresponsibly in order to re-hoist a structure that - we are equally assured - was fundamentally unsound.

Is it me or is it getting a bit anomic round here?

The other possibility of course, which no-one dares to raise, is that this is not a fluctuation, but a one-way descent to Britian's natural level in a global marketplace.

Why would such a small and unproductive island, over-populated with surplus workers who get paid for staying at home, assume any other position?

Rhoda Klapp

It's now my policy never to employ anyone. Too many rules and rights, all going one way. And the ever-present chance that some new regulation will give a new right to people who you already employ, and suddenly some bloke with an essential skill is off on paternity leave for months, and you have no way to cover for him that doesn't involve giving new rights to somebody else...

Creative destruction may be working, but there is a risk to every company, if debtors don't pay, or pay late, and your cash flow disappears.

Of course if your company is too big to fail, creative destruction doesn't affect you, you'll get rescued by the taxpayer.

Rhoda Klapp

Alf, hush, we are not supposed to talk like that in a political forum like this. Reality is not be be encouraged, nor are political figues to be asked sensible questions. It's about the soap opera of westminster, not our competitive place in the world economy.

seb

JohnAnt

Perhaps the EU does not figure in the list of voters' top priorities. Perhaps this is because voters appreciate that the three largest parties are composed of people too cowardly to do anything about democratising the EU or giving it something it lacks at the moment - any conceivably worthwhile purpose. By purpose, I am not referring to 'luxury retirement villa' for political has-beens.

Tim Carpenter LPUK

The only way to turn around the situation is to get the State out of people's way so they might get working, form companies and employ people productively. I know Socialists think that State run or State paid "salaried unemployed' is "work", but no matter how many times it is said, it just isn't.

It goes without saying that the yoke of EU regulation needs to be removed and sovereignty returned to the UK. We need dramatic cuts in State spending on bureaucracy. The best way to "focus the mind" is to cut State incomes - taxation and borrowing.