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John Kay has been writing a column on economics and business since 1995. His academic career has included chairs at London Business School and Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is currently a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He also had a career in the policy world which established the Institute for Fiscal Studies as one of the most respected think tanks, and a business career in which he established, developed and sold a substantial consulting firm and in which he has been a non-executive director of Halifax plc and several companies.
John has published many books, including Foundations of Corporate Success (1993), The Truth about Markets (2003) and most recently The Long and the Short of It: finance and investment for normally intelligent people who are not in the industry. His new book, Obliquity, will be published by Profile Books in March 2010.
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Uncommon Sense
This compilation of essays from the blog of Gary Becker and Richard Posner covers a range of topical issues including gay marriage, terrorism and traffic congestion, says John Kay
Chaotic evolution defines the market economy
Markets are not a well-oiled machine: they are a constantly changing, adaptive biological systemn, writes John Kay
‘Too big to fail’ is too dumb an idea to keep
While regulators may be at fault in not having acted sufficiently vigorously, to say they caused the crisis is as ludicrous as saying that crime is caused by the indolence of the police, writes John Kay
True survivors do not clutch at straws
We are all inclined to believe we have more influence over events than we do. The answer is to maintain a sense of our long-term objectives while acknowledging the limits to our freedom, writes John Kay
How the skies proved the limits of regulation
The experience of the airline industry illustrates the phenomenon of regulatory capture – the tendency for regulators to see through the eyes of the industry they regulate, writes John Kay
Markets after the age of efficiency
If markets are informationally efficient, why is there so much trade between people who take different views of the same future? If the theory were true, the activities it purports to explain would barely exist, writes John Kay
Evolution is the real hidden hand in business
Large and complex corporations, like biological organisms, could only be the product of incremental change and adaptation. Their common essential characteristic is inexact replication, writes John Kay
Do not discount what you cannot measure
Bogus measures add nothing to our understanding – they attempt to compress complex problems and analyses into single observations, writes John Kay
Everyday banking with no bill to the taxpayer
Deposits need to be backed by safe assets otherwise the mismatch of risk provides an unjustifiable public subsidy, writes John Kay
‘Tailgating’ in financial markets puts us all at risk
Carry trades, which yield constant small margins punctuated by occasional large losses, offer transitory profits that are entirely offset by unrealised, but inevitable, future losses, writes John Kay
