What is a market? asked a Russian
It is a form of coordination
Where many producers
Meet demands of consumers
Using profit as a consideration
Copyright - Girish Menon
“Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes" Goethe. “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.” Herbert Spencer
Search This Blog
Sunday 9 September 2007
Structural Adjustment
I'm being made redundant
In a land which is abundant
Employment is high
Market boom is nigh
It's called Structural Adjustment
Copyright - Girish Menon
In a land which is abundant
Employment is high
Market boom is nigh
It's called Structural Adjustment
Copyright - Girish Menon
Thursday 6 September 2007
The Fat Cats Protection League
Wherever you hear the words “free market”, you’ll find massive state handouts to corporations -- it only survives and relies on constant government support.
GEORGE MONBIOT
After my column last week, several people wrote to point out that the neoliberal project - which demands a minimal state and maximum corporate freedom - actually relies on constant government support. They are of course quite right. The current financial crisis, caused by a failure to regulate financial services properly, is being postponed by government bail-outs. The US Federal Reserve has reduced its lending rate to the commercial banks, while the Bundesbank organised a E3.5bn rescue of the lending company IKB. This happens whenever the banks suffer the consequences of the freedom they demand. But over the past week an even starker example has emerged.
In Britain the split loyalties of the major political parties has created a hybrid system of public provision. If it left public services intact, the party in power would be roasted by the corporate media, but if it attempted full-scale privatisation, it would be booted out of office. So the last Conservative government devised a plan which would keep both sides if not exactly happy then at least totally bewildered. They called it the private finance initiative, or PFI. Corporations would build and run our schools, hospitals, roads and prisons and rent them to the state. This, the Tories maintained, would enable costs to be cut, while ensuring that public services remained free of charge.
At first Labour opposed this scheme. Alastair Darling warned in opposition that “apparent savings now could be countered by the formidable commitment on revenue expenditure in years to come”(1). But as the 1997 election approached, Labour sought to prove that it was more sympathetic to business than the Tories. Two months after the party took office, the health secretary, Alan Milburn, announced that “when there is a limited amount of public-sector capital available, as there is, it’s PFI or bust”(2). From then on, the only money the NHS could rely on for capital projects belonged to the private sector.
The problem was that much of what the NHS wanted to do was not attractive to private financiers. In Coventry, for example, it had been planning to refurbish its two hospitals at a cost of £30m(3). But its analysts realised that business would not be interested. The scheme was too small and there was no scope for the financial innovation which could produce serious profits. As a confidential report by the local health authority showed in 1998, the health service re-designed its scheme to make it more attractive to private capital(4). Instead of refurbishing the two existing hospitals, it would ask private business to knock them down and build a new one - the University Hospital. This would cost not £30m but £174m. The health experts who wrote the confidential report predicted than in order to find this money, the hospital trust would have to cut both beds and services. They have just been proved right.
Did I say £174m? I beg your pardon. By January 2002, the price had risen to £290m(5). A month later it reached £311m. By the end of that year it had grown to £330m(6). In 2003 it was estimated at £370m. In March 2007, the Birmingham Post reported that the final cost was £410m(7). This year the hospital trust must find £56m, in the form of repayments and service fees, to hand to the private consortium(8). The annual cost will rise in line with the retail price index for 30 years.
It is now pretty obvious that this fee is unpayable, if the hospital is to maintain a proper standard of care. Over the past few days the hospital trust has announced a £30m hole in its budget(9).Around £10m of the necessary cuts could be found by making staff redundant: it will lose perhaps 200 people, possibly 375. It will also rely on “revenue generating activities”. These include charging people £3 for dropping their sick relatives outside the hospital, and £10 for parking there, while cancelling the free parking scheme for disabled people. As the new hospital (against the wishes of 160,000 people who signed the Socialist Party’s petition to have it built in the city centre) is on the edge of the city, which means that it is hard to reach without a car, this is an effective way of raising money. But it casts doubt on the government’s claim that the NHS remains free at the point of use.
The trust’s press officer told me that this cost-cutting is a unique event: “we have always balanced our books up to this year”(10). But in 2005 - the year in which the PFI payments began - a leaked memo revealed that the trust was anticipating a deficit of £13m by the end of the financial year and “drastic measures” were required to plug the gap(11). These included the closure of one ward, the removal of eight beds from another, limiting the opening hours of the Surgical Assessment Unit and the “rationalisation of certain posts”: which meant, eventually, cutting 116 jobs(12).
In 2006 the local paper reported a shortfall of £29m(13). This was met partly by freezing the recruitment of district nurses. In January this year, the hospital announced that it was closing another ward, just six months after it opened(14). Yet another ward - treating people with acute conditions such as pneumonia and strokes - was closed in June(15). The impact of these cuts is already being felt: three months ago the new hospital found itself in the bottom ten in the national league table for waiting times(16). Where will the money come from over the rest of the 30-year contract?
There is one set of costs the hospital cannot cut: the money it must pay every year to the private financiers. In September 1997 the government declared that these payments would be legally guaranteed: beds, doctors, nurses and managers could be sacrificed, but not the annual donation to the Fat Cats Protection League(17). The great free market experiment looks more like a corporate welfare scheme.
The government justifies all this by claiming that privately financed schemes are cheaper than comparable public schemes. Allyson Pollock showed on these pages in April that the data required to support this claim does not exist, or if it does the government refuses to release it(18). But as the Coventry scheme shows, there’s an even bigger deception at work. The government compares the cost of building the hospital under PFI with the imagined cost of building it with public money. But it would not have been built with public money. If public funds had been available, the two existing hospitals would have been refurbished, at around one 13th of the cost.
It was Gordon Brown who insisted that PFI became the principal means of funding capital projects in the United Kingdom. By deferring costs into the future, as Darling warned, he was able to sustain his reputation as an iron chancellor, while suppressing the constant baying of the corporate press. The BBC predicted that in his speech yesterday, Brown would announce a reduction in the corporations’ involvement in the public sector(19). It was about the only subject he did not discuss(20). For all his talk of “listening and engaging”, corporate power still seems to be forbidden territory.
GEORGE MONBIOT
After my column last week, several people wrote to point out that the neoliberal project - which demands a minimal state and maximum corporate freedom - actually relies on constant government support. They are of course quite right. The current financial crisis, caused by a failure to regulate financial services properly, is being postponed by government bail-outs. The US Federal Reserve has reduced its lending rate to the commercial banks, while the Bundesbank organised a E3.5bn rescue of the lending company IKB. This happens whenever the banks suffer the consequences of the freedom they demand. But over the past week an even starker example has emerged.
In Britain the split loyalties of the major political parties has created a hybrid system of public provision. If it left public services intact, the party in power would be roasted by the corporate media, but if it attempted full-scale privatisation, it would be booted out of office. So the last Conservative government devised a plan which would keep both sides if not exactly happy then at least totally bewildered. They called it the private finance initiative, or PFI. Corporations would build and run our schools, hospitals, roads and prisons and rent them to the state. This, the Tories maintained, would enable costs to be cut, while ensuring that public services remained free of charge.
At first Labour opposed this scheme. Alastair Darling warned in opposition that “apparent savings now could be countered by the formidable commitment on revenue expenditure in years to come”(1). But as the 1997 election approached, Labour sought to prove that it was more sympathetic to business than the Tories. Two months after the party took office, the health secretary, Alan Milburn, announced that “when there is a limited amount of public-sector capital available, as there is, it’s PFI or bust”(2). From then on, the only money the NHS could rely on for capital projects belonged to the private sector.
The problem was that much of what the NHS wanted to do was not attractive to private financiers. In Coventry, for example, it had been planning to refurbish its two hospitals at a cost of £30m(3). But its analysts realised that business would not be interested. The scheme was too small and there was no scope for the financial innovation which could produce serious profits. As a confidential report by the local health authority showed in 1998, the health service re-designed its scheme to make it more attractive to private capital(4). Instead of refurbishing the two existing hospitals, it would ask private business to knock them down and build a new one - the University Hospital. This would cost not £30m but £174m. The health experts who wrote the confidential report predicted than in order to find this money, the hospital trust would have to cut both beds and services. They have just been proved right.
Did I say £174m? I beg your pardon. By January 2002, the price had risen to £290m(5). A month later it reached £311m. By the end of that year it had grown to £330m(6). In 2003 it was estimated at £370m. In March 2007, the Birmingham Post reported that the final cost was £410m(7). This year the hospital trust must find £56m, in the form of repayments and service fees, to hand to the private consortium(8). The annual cost will rise in line with the retail price index for 30 years.
It is now pretty obvious that this fee is unpayable, if the hospital is to maintain a proper standard of care. Over the past few days the hospital trust has announced a £30m hole in its budget(9).Around £10m of the necessary cuts could be found by making staff redundant: it will lose perhaps 200 people, possibly 375. It will also rely on “revenue generating activities”. These include charging people £3 for dropping their sick relatives outside the hospital, and £10 for parking there, while cancelling the free parking scheme for disabled people. As the new hospital (against the wishes of 160,000 people who signed the Socialist Party’s petition to have it built in the city centre) is on the edge of the city, which means that it is hard to reach without a car, this is an effective way of raising money. But it casts doubt on the government’s claim that the NHS remains free at the point of use.
The trust’s press officer told me that this cost-cutting is a unique event: “we have always balanced our books up to this year”(10). But in 2005 - the year in which the PFI payments began - a leaked memo revealed that the trust was anticipating a deficit of £13m by the end of the financial year and “drastic measures” were required to plug the gap(11). These included the closure of one ward, the removal of eight beds from another, limiting the opening hours of the Surgical Assessment Unit and the “rationalisation of certain posts”: which meant, eventually, cutting 116 jobs(12).
In 2006 the local paper reported a shortfall of £29m(13). This was met partly by freezing the recruitment of district nurses. In January this year, the hospital announced that it was closing another ward, just six months after it opened(14). Yet another ward - treating people with acute conditions such as pneumonia and strokes - was closed in June(15). The impact of these cuts is already being felt: three months ago the new hospital found itself in the bottom ten in the national league table for waiting times(16). Where will the money come from over the rest of the 30-year contract?
There is one set of costs the hospital cannot cut: the money it must pay every year to the private financiers. In September 1997 the government declared that these payments would be legally guaranteed: beds, doctors, nurses and managers could be sacrificed, but not the annual donation to the Fat Cats Protection League(17). The great free market experiment looks more like a corporate welfare scheme.
The government justifies all this by claiming that privately financed schemes are cheaper than comparable public schemes. Allyson Pollock showed on these pages in April that the data required to support this claim does not exist, or if it does the government refuses to release it(18). But as the Coventry scheme shows, there’s an even bigger deception at work. The government compares the cost of building the hospital under PFI with the imagined cost of building it with public money. But it would not have been built with public money. If public funds had been available, the two existing hospitals would have been refurbished, at around one 13th of the cost.
It was Gordon Brown who insisted that PFI became the principal means of funding capital projects in the United Kingdom. By deferring costs into the future, as Darling warned, he was able to sustain his reputation as an iron chancellor, while suppressing the constant baying of the corporate press. The BBC predicted that in his speech yesterday, Brown would announce a reduction in the corporations’ involvement in the public sector(19). It was about the only subject he did not discuss(20). For all his talk of “listening and engaging”, corporate power still seems to be forbidden territory.
The Predicted Financial Storm Has Arrived
By Gabriel Kolko
01 September, 2007
Zmag
Contradictions now wrack the world's financial system, and a growing consensus exists between those who endorse it and those who argue the status quo is both crisis-prone as well as immoral. If we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, we are on the verge of a serious crisis-if not now, then in the near future.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Bank for International Settlements, the British Financial Services Authority, the Financial Times, and innumerable mainstream commentators were increasingly worried and publicly warned against many of the financial innovations that have now imploded. Warren Buffett, whom Forbes ranks the second richest man in the world, last year called credit derivatives-only one of the many new banking inventions-"financial weapons of mass destruction." Very conservative institutions and people predicted the upheaval in global finances we are today experiencing.
The IMF has taken the lead in criticizing the new international financial structure, and over the past three years it has published numerous detailed reasons why it has become so dangerous to the world's economic stability. Events have confirmed its prognostication that complexity and lack of transparency, the obscurity of risks and universal uncertainty, especially regarding collateralized debt and loan obligations, will cause a flight to security that will dry up much of the liquidity of banking. "…Financial innovation itself," as a Financial Times columnist put it, "is the problem". The ultra-creative system is seizing up because no one understands where risks are located or how it works. It began to do so this summer and fixing it is not very likely.
It is impossible to measure the extent of the losses. The final results of this deluge have yet to be calculated. Even many of the players who have stakes in the countless arcane investment instruments are utterly ignorant. The sums are enormous.
Only a few of the many measures give us a rough estimate:
The present crisis began-it has scarcely ended there--with subprime mortgage loans in the U.S., which were valued at over $1.3 trillion at the beginning of 2007 but are, for practical purposes, worth far, far less today. We can ignore the impact of this crisis on U.S. housing prices, but some projections are of a 10 percent decline-another trillion or so. Indirectly, of course, the mortgage crisis has also brought many millions of people into the larger financial world and they will get badly hurt.
What the subprime market did was unleash a far greater maelstrom involving banks in Germany, France, Asia, and throughout the world, calling into question much of the world financial system as it has developed over the past decade.
Investment banks hold about $300 billion in private equity debts they planned to place-mainly in leveraged buy-outs. They will be forced to sell them at discounts or keep them on their balance sheets-either way they will lose.
The near-failure of the German Sachsen LB bank, which had to be saved from bankruptcy with 17.3 billion euros in credit, revealed that European banks hold over half-trillion dollars in so-called asset backed commercial paper, much of it in the U. S. and subprime mortgages. A failure in America caused Europe too to face a crisis. The problem is scarcely isolated.
The leading victim of this upheaval are the hedge funds. What are hedge funds? There are about 10,000 and, all told, they do everything. Some hedge funds, however, provided companies with capital and successfully competed with commercial banks because they took much greater risks. A substantial proportion is simple gamblers; some even bet on the weather--hunches. Many look to their computers and mathematics for models to guide their investments, and these have lost the most money, but funds based on other strategies also lost during August. The spectacular Long-term Capital Management 1998 failure was also due to its reliance on ingenious mathematical propositions, yet no one learned any lessons from it, proving that appeals to reason as well as experience fall on deaf ears if there is money to be made.
Some gained during the August crisis but more lost, and in the aggregate the hedge funds lost a great deal-their allure of rapid riches gone. There have been some spectacular bankruptcies and bailouts, including some of the biggest investment firms. Investors who got cold feet found that withdrawing money from hedge funds was nigh on impossible. The real worth of their holdings is hotly contested, and valuations vary wildly. In reality, there is no way to appraise them realistically-they all depend largely on what people want to believe and will take, or the market.
We are at an end of an era, living through the worst financial panic in many decades. Now begins global financial instability. It is impossible to speculate how long today's turmoil will last-but there now exists an uncertainty and lack of confidence that has been unparalleled since the 1930s-and this ignorance and fear is itself a crucial factor. The moment of reckoning for bankers and bosses has arrived. What is very clear is that losses are massive and the entire developed world is now experiencing the worst economic crisis since 1945, one in which troubles in one nation compound those in others.
All central banks are wracked by dilemmas. They have neither the resources nor the knowledge, including legal powers, to remedy the present maelstrom. Although there is clamor from financiers and assorted operators to bail them out, the Federal Reserve must also weigh the consequences of its moves, above all for inflation. Then there is the question of "moral hazards." Is the Federal Reserve's responsibility to save financial adventurers from their own follies? Throughout August the American and European central banks plunged about a half-trillion dollars into the banking system in an attempt to unfreeze blocked credit and loans that followed the subprime crisis-an event which triggered a "flight to safety" which greatly reduced banks' willingness to loan. In effect, the Federal Reserve relied on banks to restore confidence in the financial system, subsidizing their efforts.
Central banks' efforts succeeded only very partially but, in the aggregate, they failed: banks and investors now seek security rather than risk, and they will sit on their money. The Federal Reserve privately acknowledges its inability to cope with an inordinately complex financial structure. European central bankers are in exactly the same dilemma: they simply don't know what to do.
But this scarcely touches the real problem, which is structural and impinges wholly on the way the world financial structure has evolved over the past two decades. As in the past, there is a critical split in the banking and finance world and each has political leverage along with clashing interests. More important, central banks were not designed to cope with today's realities and have neither the legal powers nor knowledge to control them.
In this context, central banks will have increasing problems and the solutions they propose, as in the past, will be utterly inadequate, not because their intentions are wrong but because it is impossible to regulate such a vast, complex economy-even less today than in the past because there is no international mechanism to do so. Internationalization of finance has meant less regulation than ever, and regulation was scarcely very effective even at the national level.
Not only leftists are naïve but so too are those conservatives who think they can speak truth to power and change the course of events. Greed's only bounds are what makes money. Existing international institutions-of which the IMF is the most important--or well-intentioned advice will not change this reality.
01 September, 2007
Zmag
Contradictions now wrack the world's financial system, and a growing consensus exists between those who endorse it and those who argue the status quo is both crisis-prone as well as immoral. If we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, we are on the verge of a serious crisis-if not now, then in the near future.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Bank for International Settlements, the British Financial Services Authority, the Financial Times, and innumerable mainstream commentators were increasingly worried and publicly warned against many of the financial innovations that have now imploded. Warren Buffett, whom Forbes ranks the second richest man in the world, last year called credit derivatives-only one of the many new banking inventions-"financial weapons of mass destruction." Very conservative institutions and people predicted the upheaval in global finances we are today experiencing.
The IMF has taken the lead in criticizing the new international financial structure, and over the past three years it has published numerous detailed reasons why it has become so dangerous to the world's economic stability. Events have confirmed its prognostication that complexity and lack of transparency, the obscurity of risks and universal uncertainty, especially regarding collateralized debt and loan obligations, will cause a flight to security that will dry up much of the liquidity of banking. "…Financial innovation itself," as a Financial Times columnist put it, "is the problem". The ultra-creative system is seizing up because no one understands where risks are located or how it works. It began to do so this summer and fixing it is not very likely.
It is impossible to measure the extent of the losses. The final results of this deluge have yet to be calculated. Even many of the players who have stakes in the countless arcane investment instruments are utterly ignorant. The sums are enormous.
Only a few of the many measures give us a rough estimate:
The present crisis began-it has scarcely ended there--with subprime mortgage loans in the U.S., which were valued at over $1.3 trillion at the beginning of 2007 but are, for practical purposes, worth far, far less today. We can ignore the impact of this crisis on U.S. housing prices, but some projections are of a 10 percent decline-another trillion or so. Indirectly, of course, the mortgage crisis has also brought many millions of people into the larger financial world and they will get badly hurt.
What the subprime market did was unleash a far greater maelstrom involving banks in Germany, France, Asia, and throughout the world, calling into question much of the world financial system as it has developed over the past decade.
Investment banks hold about $300 billion in private equity debts they planned to place-mainly in leveraged buy-outs. They will be forced to sell them at discounts or keep them on their balance sheets-either way they will lose.
The near-failure of the German Sachsen LB bank, which had to be saved from bankruptcy with 17.3 billion euros in credit, revealed that European banks hold over half-trillion dollars in so-called asset backed commercial paper, much of it in the U. S. and subprime mortgages. A failure in America caused Europe too to face a crisis. The problem is scarcely isolated.
The leading victim of this upheaval are the hedge funds. What are hedge funds? There are about 10,000 and, all told, they do everything. Some hedge funds, however, provided companies with capital and successfully competed with commercial banks because they took much greater risks. A substantial proportion is simple gamblers; some even bet on the weather--hunches. Many look to their computers and mathematics for models to guide their investments, and these have lost the most money, but funds based on other strategies also lost during August. The spectacular Long-term Capital Management 1998 failure was also due to its reliance on ingenious mathematical propositions, yet no one learned any lessons from it, proving that appeals to reason as well as experience fall on deaf ears if there is money to be made.
Some gained during the August crisis but more lost, and in the aggregate the hedge funds lost a great deal-their allure of rapid riches gone. There have been some spectacular bankruptcies and bailouts, including some of the biggest investment firms. Investors who got cold feet found that withdrawing money from hedge funds was nigh on impossible. The real worth of their holdings is hotly contested, and valuations vary wildly. In reality, there is no way to appraise them realistically-they all depend largely on what people want to believe and will take, or the market.
We are at an end of an era, living through the worst financial panic in many decades. Now begins global financial instability. It is impossible to speculate how long today's turmoil will last-but there now exists an uncertainty and lack of confidence that has been unparalleled since the 1930s-and this ignorance and fear is itself a crucial factor. The moment of reckoning for bankers and bosses has arrived. What is very clear is that losses are massive and the entire developed world is now experiencing the worst economic crisis since 1945, one in which troubles in one nation compound those in others.
All central banks are wracked by dilemmas. They have neither the resources nor the knowledge, including legal powers, to remedy the present maelstrom. Although there is clamor from financiers and assorted operators to bail them out, the Federal Reserve must also weigh the consequences of its moves, above all for inflation. Then there is the question of "moral hazards." Is the Federal Reserve's responsibility to save financial adventurers from their own follies? Throughout August the American and European central banks plunged about a half-trillion dollars into the banking system in an attempt to unfreeze blocked credit and loans that followed the subprime crisis-an event which triggered a "flight to safety" which greatly reduced banks' willingness to loan. In effect, the Federal Reserve relied on banks to restore confidence in the financial system, subsidizing their efforts.
Central banks' efforts succeeded only very partially but, in the aggregate, they failed: banks and investors now seek security rather than risk, and they will sit on their money. The Federal Reserve privately acknowledges its inability to cope with an inordinately complex financial structure. European central bankers are in exactly the same dilemma: they simply don't know what to do.
But this scarcely touches the real problem, which is structural and impinges wholly on the way the world financial structure has evolved over the past two decades. As in the past, there is a critical split in the banking and finance world and each has political leverage along with clashing interests. More important, central banks were not designed to cope with today's realities and have neither the legal powers nor knowledge to control them.
In this context, central banks will have increasing problems and the solutions they propose, as in the past, will be utterly inadequate, not because their intentions are wrong but because it is impossible to regulate such a vast, complex economy-even less today than in the past because there is no international mechanism to do so. Internationalization of finance has meant less regulation than ever, and regulation was scarcely very effective even at the national level.
Not only leftists are naïve but so too are those conservatives who think they can speak truth to power and change the course of events. Greed's only bounds are what makes money. Existing international institutions-of which the IMF is the most important--or well-intentioned advice will not change this reality.
Monday 3 September 2007
Some humor for the week - enjoy!!!
A local newspaper (in England) ran a competition
asking for a rhyme with the most romantic first
line... But the least romantic second line.
Here are some of the entries they received.
*********
My feelings for you no words can tell,
Except for maybe " go to hell"
*********
Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and
so are you.
But the roses are wilting, the violets are dead, the
sugar bowl's empty and so is your head.
*********
Oh loving beauty you float with grace
If only you could hide your face
*********
Kind, intelligent, loving and hot;
This describes everything you are not
*********
I want to feel your sweet embrace
But don't take that paper bag off of your face
*********
I love your smile, your face, and your eyes -
Damn, I'm good at telling lies !
*********
I see your face when I am dreaming.
That's why I always wake up screaming
*********
My love, you take my breath away.
What have you stepped in to smell this way
Are you the Quizmaster? Play BrainBattle with a friend now!
Sunday 2 September 2007
About MBA education!
- The principal achievements of a business school education are:
"First, to equip students with a vocabulary that enables them to talk authoritatively about subjects they did not understand.
Second, to give students the ability to withstand any amount of disconfirming evidence.
Third, to give students a ticket of admission to a job where they could learn something about management".
------
- All MBA graduates should have a skull and crossbones on their foreheads along with warnings that they are not fit to manage.
--------
- The business community has run one of the most successful sales campaigns of the 20th century - persuading most of us that business people have the answer to everything from biscuitmaking to hospitals to schools.
------
- Modern business methods based on the so called 'management sciences' taught in business schools are not infallible.
-----
- One of the weaknesses of the business culture and its "management sciences" is that it is too certain; it does not allow for questioning of its wisdom and it often ignores the voice of experience.
Extracted from India's Unending Journey by Mark Tully
"First, to equip students with a vocabulary that enables them to talk authoritatively about subjects they did not understand.
Second, to give students the ability to withstand any amount of disconfirming evidence.
Third, to give students a ticket of admission to a job where they could learn something about management".
------
- All MBA graduates should have a skull and crossbones on their foreheads along with warnings that they are not fit to manage.
--------
- The business community has run one of the most successful sales campaigns of the 20th century - persuading most of us that business people have the answer to everything from biscuitmaking to hospitals to schools.
------
- Modern business methods based on the so called 'management sciences' taught in business schools are not infallible.
-----
- One of the weaknesses of the business culture and its "management sciences" is that it is too certain; it does not allow for questioning of its wisdom and it often ignores the voice of experience.
Extracted from India's Unending Journey by Mark Tully
Call the fat cats’ bluff and tax their preposterous pay fairly
September 2, 2007
Simon Jenkins
Prison officers last week went on strike over a pay rise of 2.5%, phased. The heads of Britain’s 100 biggest companies have had 37%, unphased, as presumably are its recipients. The bosses won 28% more last year, 16% the year before and 13% and 23% in the two preceding years, yielding an average pay of £2.8m a head or 20 times the rise in price inflation. Under Labour, these company directors have stretched their remuneration to almost 100 times average earnings, a gap unprecedented since the rise of modern taxation.
Is this a good or bad thing? Any pay package is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. But for an entire class of workers to receive sequential increases of 37%, 28% and 16% suggests a serious leakage of cash from businesses into the pockets of those at the top. Nor is there any noticeable relationship of pay to company size or success. Last week Eric Nicoli left as boss of EMI after eight years in which the company faltered and its share price fell by 40%. Yet he received £800,000 a year in salary and was given a leaving present of £2.8m.
Cash bonuses mostly in financial services are beyond the imaginings of wage slaves. Bob Diamond, who works at (but does not even run) the floundering Barclays Bank, took a bonus of £10.4m this year. Sir Fred Goodwin of the Royal Bank of Scotland took £2.7m. Last month’s Guardian/Office for National Statistics survey reported that bonuses overall increased 30% in 2007 to £14 billion, double last year’s rise. Readers may be tempted to ask how people contrive to dispose of such sensational winnings each year.
The apologists have been in full cry. A simple response is to play the comparisons game. These companies are the size of small states and their leaders have a right to tax their workers and shareholders accordingly. So implies Peter Newhouse, the survey’s author, and a consultant with Reward Technology Forum. He says we should publicise rewards as “an important message to able and aspirational young people”. The CBI adds that companies must pay “the going rate” or competitive talent will float offshore and something called UK plc will suffer. Britain now depends for a third of its income on financial services, so do not kill the geese that lay the golden eggs.
Nor is that all. As this money swills through the pockets of bonus recipients, say the apologists, it “trickles down”, finding an outlet not just in blue-chip properties but in cars, restaurants, holidays, nannies, clothes, hunting stables and Cotswold interiors, most with a high labour content. The incomes of the very rich allegedly redistribute to the poor faster through personal expenditure than through taxation. This is plausible given how much of the latter goes on white collar salaries, fees and subsidies.
But all this is special pleading. In allowing himself to be bluffed by the super-rich, that they will emigrate if he properly taxes their earnings, Gordon Brown falls for the Mandy Rice-Davies retort: they would say that, wouldn’t they. As for dangling £2m bonuses before the young, it is like Margaret Thatcher telling young women to find themselves rich husbands. Other proffered comparisons, such as between executives and Elton John and David Beckham, ignore the fact that such celebrities operate in a truly open market, do not determine their own incomes and, unlike City firms, receive no public money.
Anyone who has served on a corporate remuneration committee knows how it operates. It puts pay decisions out to consultants who, like the nonexecutives, the headhunters and senior management as a whole, have a vested interest in inflated incomes. Everyone scratches everyone’s back.
Discussion is not concerned with market forces but public relations. How will an outrageous bonus look to the press? Can shareholders and investors be fooled?
Apart from such rare company doctors as Stuart Rose of Marks & Spencer, who can add value out of proportion to their price, Britain is experiencing the same breakdown in top pay restraint that JK Galbraith noted in America. Corporate remuneration, he remarked, was nothing to do with the marketplace but was a heart-warming gift from executives and their friends to each other, a gift that had grown so large as to “verge on larceny”.
I suspect that wildly extravagant short-term “incentives” are as likely to distort performance as boost it, as is the case with Whitehall public service targets. As for the idea that a 37% pay rise will trickle down to help the poor, this might pass muster as an economics essay but it will get short shrift in the canteen where 2.5% is the norm. Why does trickle-down not apply to them?
The claim that executives with families well installed in London and country houses will suddenly vanish to Monaco or the Cayman Islands if not paid millions more each year (or if fully taxed on those millions) is absurd. It ignores the role of location, lifestyle and other nonpecuniary perks in a modern executive’s career package.
Being well regarded for running a successful company should be more satisfying than a reputation for greed, as BP’s Lord Browne and the privatisation “fat cats” of the 1980s found to their anguish. London’s financial preeminence is based primarily on its lax market regulation and its agreeable living conditions for those not reliant on public services. Businesses will leave Britain not when executives are properly taxed but when they start losing money.
I prefer to kick all this out of court. The rich, like the poor, are always with us. There is no morality in economics. The exponential rise in corporate pay is a hangover from the 1986 Big Bang phase of Thatcherite capitalism. If it had anything to do with free competition, there would have been a rush of talent into this market sector and a consequent fall in pay. That has not happened.
Two forces are influencing top people’s pay. The first is structural. The fortunes recently made in the City are largely due to a shift from lumbering corporate suppliers of financial services, such as banks and brokers, to fast-moving individuals and partnerships. I see no harm in this. More worrying is the new cartels, like those that the Big Bang supposedly smashed. Just four accountancy firms control large-scale audit and have spilt over into public/private finance. Half of management consultancy, again involving a small group of firms, relies on work from government. The rise in statutory regulation under Labour has sent legal and other professional bonuses soaring. As Adam Smith said, people of the same trade never meet “even in merriment” but to conspire to raise prices. This is government’s doing.
The other force is political. The widening of the pay gap, which has not occurred in continental Europe, followed the disempowering of organised labour by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, vigorously supported by Brown at the Treasury. This has released corporate Britain from any sense of self-restraint. Indulging tax loopholes for the rich while ordering workers to shoulder the fight against inflation may help Brown sound macho in the City, but it is high-risk politics.
A real sense of unfairness greeted the revelation that a number of the richest participants in economic success were, de facto, being subsidised by the rest through private equity tax evasion and/or nondomicilary status. The same anger was unleashed by the disclosure that a shift in the economy from manufacturing to financial services had led to a shift in profits to offshore tax havens.
Any lobbyist can cobble together special pleading for such antics, but they will not wash for millions of hardworking, tax-paying Britons. Low taxes for all are good, but tax breaks for a privileged few are wrong. The rising tide of wealth should float every boat, not just executive yachts.
As most people see their incomes slide ever further behind those about whom they read in the papers, they will be more inclined to cry halt. Democracy may not be the force it was, but it can deliver politicians an occasional kick, as can industrial relations. The prison officers may yet prove a straw in a wind that sweeps up others in its tail.
The days of statutory pay restraint are mercifully past, replaced in Britain by the most fluid labour market in Europe. But government vigilance is needed to retain that fluidity, and a regard for fairness to back it up.
Capital and labour will never coexist in a climate of equality, but some respect for equity must underpin the nation’s social contract. Otherwise we shall be back to the bitter divisions of the 1970s, where nobody wants to go.
Simon Jenkins
Prison officers last week went on strike over a pay rise of 2.5%, phased. The heads of Britain’s 100 biggest companies have had 37%, unphased, as presumably are its recipients. The bosses won 28% more last year, 16% the year before and 13% and 23% in the two preceding years, yielding an average pay of £2.8m a head or 20 times the rise in price inflation. Under Labour, these company directors have stretched their remuneration to almost 100 times average earnings, a gap unprecedented since the rise of modern taxation.
Is this a good or bad thing? Any pay package is, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder. But for an entire class of workers to receive sequential increases of 37%, 28% and 16% suggests a serious leakage of cash from businesses into the pockets of those at the top. Nor is there any noticeable relationship of pay to company size or success. Last week Eric Nicoli left as boss of EMI after eight years in which the company faltered and its share price fell by 40%. Yet he received £800,000 a year in salary and was given a leaving present of £2.8m.
Cash bonuses mostly in financial services are beyond the imaginings of wage slaves. Bob Diamond, who works at (but does not even run) the floundering Barclays Bank, took a bonus of £10.4m this year. Sir Fred Goodwin of the Royal Bank of Scotland took £2.7m. Last month’s Guardian/Office for National Statistics survey reported that bonuses overall increased 30% in 2007 to £14 billion, double last year’s rise. Readers may be tempted to ask how people contrive to dispose of such sensational winnings each year.
The apologists have been in full cry. A simple response is to play the comparisons game. These companies are the size of small states and their leaders have a right to tax their workers and shareholders accordingly. So implies Peter Newhouse, the survey’s author, and a consultant with Reward Technology Forum. He says we should publicise rewards as “an important message to able and aspirational young people”. The CBI adds that companies must pay “the going rate” or competitive talent will float offshore and something called UK plc will suffer. Britain now depends for a third of its income on financial services, so do not kill the geese that lay the golden eggs.
Nor is that all. As this money swills through the pockets of bonus recipients, say the apologists, it “trickles down”, finding an outlet not just in blue-chip properties but in cars, restaurants, holidays, nannies, clothes, hunting stables and Cotswold interiors, most with a high labour content. The incomes of the very rich allegedly redistribute to the poor faster through personal expenditure than through taxation. This is plausible given how much of the latter goes on white collar salaries, fees and subsidies.
But all this is special pleading. In allowing himself to be bluffed by the super-rich, that they will emigrate if he properly taxes their earnings, Gordon Brown falls for the Mandy Rice-Davies retort: they would say that, wouldn’t they. As for dangling £2m bonuses before the young, it is like Margaret Thatcher telling young women to find themselves rich husbands. Other proffered comparisons, such as between executives and Elton John and David Beckham, ignore the fact that such celebrities operate in a truly open market, do not determine their own incomes and, unlike City firms, receive no public money.
Anyone who has served on a corporate remuneration committee knows how it operates. It puts pay decisions out to consultants who, like the nonexecutives, the headhunters and senior management as a whole, have a vested interest in inflated incomes. Everyone scratches everyone’s back.
Discussion is not concerned with market forces but public relations. How will an outrageous bonus look to the press? Can shareholders and investors be fooled?
Apart from such rare company doctors as Stuart Rose of Marks & Spencer, who can add value out of proportion to their price, Britain is experiencing the same breakdown in top pay restraint that JK Galbraith noted in America. Corporate remuneration, he remarked, was nothing to do with the marketplace but was a heart-warming gift from executives and their friends to each other, a gift that had grown so large as to “verge on larceny”.
I suspect that wildly extravagant short-term “incentives” are as likely to distort performance as boost it, as is the case with Whitehall public service targets. As for the idea that a 37% pay rise will trickle down to help the poor, this might pass muster as an economics essay but it will get short shrift in the canteen where 2.5% is the norm. Why does trickle-down not apply to them?
The claim that executives with families well installed in London and country houses will suddenly vanish to Monaco or the Cayman Islands if not paid millions more each year (or if fully taxed on those millions) is absurd. It ignores the role of location, lifestyle and other nonpecuniary perks in a modern executive’s career package.
Being well regarded for running a successful company should be more satisfying than a reputation for greed, as BP’s Lord Browne and the privatisation “fat cats” of the 1980s found to their anguish. London’s financial preeminence is based primarily on its lax market regulation and its agreeable living conditions for those not reliant on public services. Businesses will leave Britain not when executives are properly taxed but when they start losing money.
I prefer to kick all this out of court. The rich, like the poor, are always with us. There is no morality in economics. The exponential rise in corporate pay is a hangover from the 1986 Big Bang phase of Thatcherite capitalism. If it had anything to do with free competition, there would have been a rush of talent into this market sector and a consequent fall in pay. That has not happened.
Two forces are influencing top people’s pay. The first is structural. The fortunes recently made in the City are largely due to a shift from lumbering corporate suppliers of financial services, such as banks and brokers, to fast-moving individuals and partnerships. I see no harm in this. More worrying is the new cartels, like those that the Big Bang supposedly smashed. Just four accountancy firms control large-scale audit and have spilt over into public/private finance. Half of management consultancy, again involving a small group of firms, relies on work from government. The rise in statutory regulation under Labour has sent legal and other professional bonuses soaring. As Adam Smith said, people of the same trade never meet “even in merriment” but to conspire to raise prices. This is government’s doing.
The other force is political. The widening of the pay gap, which has not occurred in continental Europe, followed the disempowering of organised labour by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, vigorously supported by Brown at the Treasury. This has released corporate Britain from any sense of self-restraint. Indulging tax loopholes for the rich while ordering workers to shoulder the fight against inflation may help Brown sound macho in the City, but it is high-risk politics.
A real sense of unfairness greeted the revelation that a number of the richest participants in economic success were, de facto, being subsidised by the rest through private equity tax evasion and/or nondomicilary status. The same anger was unleashed by the disclosure that a shift in the economy from manufacturing to financial services had led to a shift in profits to offshore tax havens.
Any lobbyist can cobble together special pleading for such antics, but they will not wash for millions of hardworking, tax-paying Britons. Low taxes for all are good, but tax breaks for a privileged few are wrong. The rising tide of wealth should float every boat, not just executive yachts.
As most people see their incomes slide ever further behind those about whom they read in the papers, they will be more inclined to cry halt. Democracy may not be the force it was, but it can deliver politicians an occasional kick, as can industrial relations. The prison officers may yet prove a straw in a wind that sweeps up others in its tail.
The days of statutory pay restraint are mercifully past, replaced in Britain by the most fluid labour market in Europe. But government vigilance is needed to retain that fluidity, and a regard for fairness to back it up.
Capital and labour will never coexist in a climate of equality, but some respect for equity must underpin the nation’s social contract. Otherwise we shall be back to the bitter divisions of the 1970s, where nobody wants to go.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)