Dec 11, 2018
The arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief finance officer and the daughter of the founder of Huawei, one of China’s richest men, by Canadian authorities on spying charges could be a game-changer for the global multilateral trading system. The Canadians are acting on behalf of the Americans here. Washington is pulling the strings.
Huawei is the world’s largest telecom manufacturer, and the second largest smartphone maker after Apple. America accuses it of stealing American technology; most likely Apple’s technology.
Dec 4, 2018
Burlington Vermont is cold in late November. Huge mounds of recently cleared snow attest to the coming of winter, which in this part of the world, just below the Canadian border and far from the warming influence of the oceans, is long, dark and absolutely freezing.
The shops of Church Street are doing a brisk business in quilted jackets, boots and woolly hats. With its open log fires, law-abiding citizens and reusable coffee mugs, there’s a touch of a little Denmark in North America about this place. That is until you see the row upon row of F-16 fighter jets in the airport terminal.
This is definitely America; but it’s not the America we have come to expect in the era of Trump. Vermont is a tolerant, wealthy, almost Trudeauesque corner of the US. It was the first state to abolish slavery, is home to the hippy ice cream moguls Ben and Jerry, and has returned Bernie Sanders to the Senate for the past two decades.
Nov 27, 2018
The share prices of Facebook, Apple and Google have slumped. Apple’s is down almost 20 per cent in a few weeks, and the story for the other two isn’t much better.
Over the past few weeks, the so-called Faangs – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google – have lost $1 trillion in value.
Before examining the situation on Wall Street, let’s step back and examine the process whereby world-beating companies go from rude health to fragility in short order; the process is so much more interesting than the event.
Nov 20, 2018
Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin is a busy hub to the northeast of the city centre. The last time I sat on the U-Bahn here, the train slowed down and then passed through a creepy, dimly-lit and empty station with only East German border guards on the platform. It was the summer of 1989, just three months before the wall came down. Rosenthaler Platz was what was called a “ghost station”. The underground was constructed before the wall went up in 1962 and this was one of the stations which was boarded up when the city was divided. The trains from West Berlin passed through East Berlin, weaving right through the middle of the city, only to re-emerge back into the West and literally into the light.
Today it is buzzing with foreign students, start-ups and cafes that have turned themselves into communal workspaces. In fact, the one I am in, Oberholz provides a vision of what much of work life in the future may be like: semi-autonomous, creative teams working together on a project by project basis, hiring space in a cafe for a limited time rather than being full-time employees with full-time tenancy in a fixed office. Right now this is still only a small minority of workers but it could become the norm.
Nov 13, 2018
Let’s look at the housing shortage through the lens of planning permission objections. We rarely think about the impact on house prices of individuals or groups of individuals opposing planning permission.
Each objection may be legitimate but, in the aggregate, planning objections have a knock-on effect on the availability and cost of housing. Indeed, the trade-off between individual rights and the collective good, so evident when planning restrictions are sought via objections, goes to the very heart of macroeconomics.
Nov 6, 2018
Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty, is said to have declared: “Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes the laws”. The implication is that parliaments can talk about laws or indeed change them, but the real power in a country or a city lies with whoever controls the money. Everything flows from this.
The story of Rothschild’s ascent from the closed, embattled, ghetto – the Judengasse of Frankfurt – to the seats of power in London, Paris and Madrid is one of the most fantastic entrepreneurial odysseys imaginable. His ability, courage and daring were extraordinary and he took advantage of exceptional circumstances and world-shattering events.
