I have blogged before on the increasing off-shoring of professional jobs. The issue continues to attract comment from bloggers, with Richard Murphy arguing against expecting large scale off-shoring of professional work. I think he is wrong.
Sharp eyed readers may have noticed a subtle change to the Creative Commons licence notice in the side bar. The logic is quite simple. I do not, at the moment, intend to directly make revenue from this blog. I do intend to use it to spread my ideas and to enhance my reputation. So I should encourage people to reproduce my material, as long as they attribute it.
Sorry for the title, but it matches what people search for. I have been seriously trying out “web 2.0” social networking for the first time and I got very annoyed.
Eric Rasmusen has an interesting proposal on how to pay CEOs. I think the underlying ideas is right, but I see one danger in his proposal, and one aspect of motivation that he is missing.
Putting together the information from these articles from the Christain Science Monitor and the Washington Post, (found via Greg Mankiw’s blog) once more emphasis the enormous economic benefits of immigration. It also demolishes the arguments of those “concerned” about immigration, in Britain as well as the US.
Although Telecity Redbus is not yet known to investors, it is very well known in its business: renting space in its data centre for critical servers, together with. The Telegraph reports that it is considering a floatation for around £500m (found via FT Alphaville.)
I am not always nice about The Economist, which I feel is not as good as it once was. However, their chief information officer, Andrew Rashbass seems to be as independent minded and analystical as one could wish, deflating technology hype, and being amusing while doing it.
I have written a simple program to provide a slightly more convenient summary of information in the CSV of incoming link information you can download from Google Webmaster Tools.
It is common to hear the City being blamed for pushing companies into cost cutting strategies. I never really believed this, and now comes some solid evidence that Wall Street does not like job cuts. The City is not likely to be different.
Sir Nigel Rudd, the chairman of Alliance Boots, thinks that analysts are stupid to have failed to recognise the benefits of the merger of Boots with Alliance Unichem. A look at the returns that Boots shareholders have got suggests the analysts were right.
There is one old but good piece of advice for investors that is often forgotten. This means start with the notes, then read the main body financial statements, and only then read the the directors’ review and other similar material.
Spiegel Online reports that plans by a German public broadcaster to air Muslim mini-sermons, alongside long established Christian and Jewish ones, have been criticised by politicians but welcomed by Church leaders. What better evidence could there be that conflict between religions pales in comparison to that between religion and intolerant secular ideologies?
A blog post by a leading IT security expert explains why the market for security products fails because buyers are unable to evaluate products. This is a more striking example than those I presented earlier because it concerns sophisticated professional buyers like banks and intelligence services.
Someone got to a page on Money Terms that explains a metric for airline’s capacity by using the following search at MSN search “google airline seats”. Obviously someone had been advised to “google” for the term
Here are a few ways in which a company can exploit a strong market position to extend an existing monopoly, eliminate any remaining competition, and extract the greatest revenues at the lowest cost.
An article by Robert H Frank on trickle down economics in the NY Times points out that there is little correlation between high earners pay and how hard they work. This is backing for my views on directors pay.
Fabian Tassano has responded to my post on the problems of the emergence of monopolies and oligopolies in more and more markets. He appears to think it is less damaging than I do, and he also wants to know what I think the best alternatives are.
A post at Interactive Investor Blog on the nominal good performance of Zimbabwe’s stock exchange, is a useful reminder of the importance of real returns. This works both ways, and is why equity investors should not worry too much about currency risk.
The most sane (albeit not against a very high standard) of a number libertarian (or, at any rate, very pro-market) bloggers in Britain that I read, admits that network effects mean that many markets tend to “collapse” into monopolies. I would add that many more markets tend to become oligopolies or cartels. In the face of this, why does he still believe that leaving everything to the markets is the best way to run an economy?
It appears that cutting corporate taxes does not make a country more attractive to investors. I do not find this surprising. The long term benefits of the right government expenditure (on education, infrastructure and health, for example) are obvious. So why are governments so keen on tax cuts?