Bank of England moves to calm the markets

  Under pressure from its MPs, the government has been forced into a series of embarrassing U-turns since the mini-budgets, including climbing down on a plan to scrap the top rate of income tax. Experts believe that chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng will have to row back on more of his tax cuts or drastically cut public…

Chancellor Kwasi Kwaerteng unveils tax cuts

An increase in National Insurance is reversed and low-tax investment zones will be set up across the UK. The cap on banker’s bonuses is lifted and a planned rise in corporation tax from 19 per cent to 25 per cent in April 2023 was scrapped. The basic rate of income tax is cut to 19p…

Illusion of China’s economic growth

Since the late 1970s is China’s “reform and opening up” been key to the country’s spectacular growth? Or are they smoke screen for retrograde statist control to bolster the last major communist regime on Earth as the late Mao era became a potent global rival to the US – perhaps the dominant superpower of the…

Politics of Oil

Petroleum has always been used by humans, from time immemorial as a waterproofing agent in Noah’s Ark, as a weapon during the Crusades, and as an adhesive for Neanderthals. Its eventual extraction from the earth in vast quantities transformed into light, heat, and power. A Pipeline Runs Through it, looks at the social, economic, political,…

BoE raises interest rates to 1.75% amid cost of living crisis

  The Bank of England’s (BoE) Monetary Policy Committee has announced interest rates are rising from 1.25 per cent to 1.75 per cent. Interest rates have crossed the highest level since December 2008 after the biggest single rise since 1995, favoured by eight of the nine members of the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee who voted…

Embrace Change

Professor Lynda Gratton‘s thirty years of research into the technological, demographic, cultural, and societal trends that are shaping work and building on what we learned through our experiences of the global pandemic, has presented us with her four-step innovative framework for redesigning work that will help you. Gratton is the global thought-leader on the future…

GE’s boss’s influence

David Gelles, New York Times reporter, former financial Times reporter and  “Corner Office” columnist reveals legendary GE CEO Jack Welch to be the root of all that’s wrong with capitalism today and offers advice on how we might right those wrongs. In 1981, Jack Welch, a scrappy Boston-born outsider, who was the surprise choice for…