Business and Economics

By Guy Dorrell Every turn of the economic cycle seems to bring another fad; 2007, just before the crash, saw food miles as the ‘must talk about’ subject of the moment. The idea that seafood should be fished from Scottish waters, shipped to Thailand for processing and then shipped back to Scotland for sale appeared absurd, because it was. Then came the economic downturn, with the first run on a bank in 200 years, and food miles slipped down everyone’s...

By Haridos Apostolides, US Correspondent The end of April saw the proposed federal minimum wage increase to $10.10 per hour defeated by a Republican-led filibuster in the United States’ Senate, all because it is claimed not to be the job of the federal government to decide salaries. The vote, however, wasn’t about giving millions of working Americans a pay raise but rather to decide if the Senate should merely discuss whether they deserve one. Democrats and Republicans live for divisive, partisan...

By Paul Johnson The government has lauded the recent economic recovery and ‘rebalancing the economy’ has been one of the popular phrases of the Coalition. But 80 per cent of new private sector jobs are in London (Centre for Cities, 2014) and many people in the North are not feeling the effects of the recent economic recovery. One of the reasons the pre-2008 model of economic growth failed is that the UK relied too heavily on public and private borrowing...

By Jack Peat, Editor of The London Economic  “I'm going to start a revolution from my bed” – Noel Gallagher Greece is the birthplace of most good ideas. From science to technology, athletics to democracy, it has long nurtured great minds and great concepts, and it was a Greek sunset in early July last year that set in motion ideas that would become The London Economic. The plan was to make a digital newspaper that would become a platform for...

By Valentina Magri “When the going gets tough, the tough gets going”, said Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the US president JFK. But what happens when the credit gets tough? Credit crunch in the UK The word “credit crunch” was unknown to most of the Brits until 9 August 2007, “the day that world changed”, according to Adam Applegarth, chief executive at the British bank Northern Rock. On that day, the French investment bank BNP Paripas stated that they will...

By Adam Walker, Economics Correspondent A common misconception, often inferred in political and economic debate, is that the United Kingdom ranks in the top five or ten positions for socio-economic factors across the board. The UK has been an economic and political superpower for years and currently ranks as the 6th largest global economy with an estimated value of £1.5 trillion in 2013. However, how competitive are we for other factors such as education, democracy and currency strength? Do we maintain these...

By Simon Bartram The term BRIC was first imprinted on the investor's psychological map of the world in 2001 through an economic thesis by Jim O'Neill. It refers to the largest emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) which were responsible for most of the global economic growth seen from the early 2000s until the financial crisis. More than a decade later, there have been immense developments in the pace of change in each of these economies, and so it's...

By Josh Black  Does it matter whether the Co-Op saves its troubled bank? In 2011, Britain’s Co-Operative Group unveiled a new marketing campaign inviting consumers to “Join the Revolution” – a movement billed as “the most radical sustainability programme in UK corporate history” designed to “spearhead its membership drive and help build a more sustainable economy.” Coming as it did in the wake of a financial crisis, just months before the country’s first ‘double-dip’ recession since the 1970s, there was a...

By Valentina Magri In the 1950s a group of post-World War II writers came together to establish a youth movement known as The Beat Generation. They rejected standards and materialism and appreciated style, innovation, drugs and Eastern religion. In today’s world, the beat generation has been replaced by The Beaten Generation. According to ILO figures cited by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde at Stanford University last February: There are over 200 million people looking for work across the globe, 75 ...