From the October issue of Master Investor Magazine In the UK, ordinary folk who never previously resented the fat cats of the City were aghast to learn that their Government had used public funds to keep the banks afloat so that the very people who had messed up could continue to receive their gigantic bonuses.…
Jeremy Corbyn, a Marxist, is now leader of one of Europe’s most enduring centre-left political parties, the British Labour Party – the one that we were taught owed more to Methodism than to Marx. (Jeremy is no Methodist – an abstainer perhaps, but a republican atheist).
New Delhi, Thursday, 01 October 2015 I was driven from Indira Ghandi Airport early this morning through bright late summer sunshine. Thirty-three degrees Celsius; hazy pale diesel-heavy sky. VW execs must love it here. My second visit to this amazing country this year, I am almost beginning to feel like a regular. And yet…
London’s Heathrow Airport is the only airport in the advanced world serving a national capital which subsists on just two runways – one for landings and one for take offs. And thus which runs continuously at flat-out full capacity. It handles 70 million passengers and 480,000 flights per year, flying to 184 destinations. That’s one…
As featured in this month’s Master Investor Magazine. In the dark days of the 1930s Depression, policy-makers were divided into those who believed that the best response to the crisis was to stimulate demand and those who believed (for good classical economic reasons) that demand should be choked. In the current policy crisis – for…
Retail therapy (shopping to you and me), so the sociologists tell us, is a means by which urban men and women seek to lift their spirits by comfort purchases of inessential goods. This is in contrast to compulsive and repeated binge shopping of largely luxury goods (normally funded by means of maxed-out credit cards) which…
Builders in this country are, in the main, a bunch of corner-cutting scallywags. But builders’ merchants are a good group of geezers: knowledgeable, happy to help and well organised. What’s more, given their increasing economies of scale they are enjoying nice margins, with much less business risk than their professional clients. In the current UK…
I read an interesting article[i] recently in the Daily Telegraph by the film critic Robbie Collin which helped to explain a trend that I had already been thinking about. A few weeks before I read this I had re-watched on DVD one of my all-time favourite movies: David Lean’s 1962 epic classic Lawrence of Arabia,…
We are driving on the A64 motorway, spindling south westwards from Toulouse, and, were we to follow it all the way we would skirt the foothills of the Pyrenees towards as far as Biarritz. It is a heat-shimmering, impeccable two-lane highway. But though the Mercedes is travelling, for now, at the statutory 120 kilometres per…
Do you remember the paperless office? This was the dream that we were peddled in the early 1980s by people like Accenture (then Andersen Consulting) with the arrival of the PC. The idea was that all physical paper – the contents of our filing cabinets, lever arch files and bookshelves – would simply disappear, displaced…
