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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 The Long and the Short of It: Finance and investment for normally intelligent people who are not in the industry (2009). His latest book, Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly, was published by Profile Books in March 2010.
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Money, like hat-wearing, depends on convention, not laws
Scottish banknotes are widely accepted in London because M&S and cabbies know what they are and treat them as cheques, writes John Kay
The pound is a poison pill for an independent Scotland
Money is accepted when people accept it, and a currency union exists when people believe that it does, writes John Kay
When capitalism and corporate self-interest collide
IBM’s engineers changed the world. In the process, they nearly destroyed the company that gave them the freedom to do so, writes John Kay
A real market economy ensures that greed is good
North Korea’s cliques understand the goal of personal enrichment as well as any Wall Street Master of the Universe, writes John Kay
Let’s talk about the market economy
Our economic system is no longer capitalism in its original form but has evolved into something altogether different, writes John Kay
Avoiding fluff is surest route to success
To understand a business one learns much more by talking to people involved in day-to-day operations than the chief executive, writes John Kay
In love as in equities, we are fooled by randomness
Men thought about sex 19 times a day. So should we correct ‘every seven seconds’ to ‘on average, once every waking hour’?, wonders John Kay
Spontaneity or slogans: the lessons of Václav Havel’s greengrocer
Vacuous rhetoric traps the leaders as well as the led. They are inhabitants of a world whose assumptions are false, writes John Kay
Taverna talk of fiscal union will remain just that
Markets cannot easily be bullied or lobbied, and their threat is effective. Fiscal rules have none of these advantages, writes John Kay
It is madness to follow a martingale betting strategy
Martingales and related strategies are the familiar currency of financial markets, writes John Kay
