In his weekly economics column in the Guardian, Larry Elliott speculates that the huge amounts of money being mentioned in connection with the desire of various banks to acquire ABN Amro may be a sign that the stock market boom is approaching a peak. The only larger takeover was that of Time Warner by AOL, [...]
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has just published a raft of research on income and ethnicity which shows that South Asian Islamic people living in the UK are likely to be hugely poorer than average, and that generally the correlation between ethnicity and poor economic outcomes in the UK are as discriminatory as we might imagine.
A short while back I mentioned the Ministry of Defence’s latest 30-year trends snapshot. Since then, I’ve come across a recently published small book that takes a rather different perspective on the trends which will affect defence and security. Beyond Terror, by Chris Abbott, Paul Rogers, and John Sloboda is an update of a report [...]
Steven Poole has a short review of Colin Hay’s Why We Hate Politics (Polity, £14.99) in today’s Guardian. Poole summarises Hay’s argument thus: the reason for declining interest in politics is not public apathy, but instead lies in the behaviour of politicians themselves.
The speed at which the issue of waste is becoming a significant trend in the UK is seen in Friday’s front pages. The Independent’s lead is headlined ‘WASTE NOT!’, about its campaign to persuade the government to get retailers to reduce the amount of packaging on products. The seond lead on the front page [...]
The current (April 2007) issue of the CBI magazine Business Voice has a pretty succinct summary of the ecological challenges to China’s economic growth, written by its Director-General Richard Lambert following a visit to the CBI’s recently opened Shanghai office. No need to summarise: it’s pithy enough already, perhaps one of the benefits of [...]
Pearce is a reporter and this is a reporter’s book (he visits places) rather than a work of theory, but he’s been following the subject for long enough to have a strong understanding of the issues. This is close to essential reading for anyone interested in the future of the planet. There’s a summary of [...]
Google got the headlines in Millward Brown’s second global BRANDZ top 100 report with the news that it had dumped Microsoft off the top spot (Microsoft ended up in third place, also behind GE, which may also be a sign of the times). And of course the whole exercise is a masterpiece of the art [...]
It looks like a throwaway line, and I haven’t seen it reported elsewhere, but Tesco’s Terry Leahy is quoted in Sunday’s Observer as saying,
‘The long-term trend of declining spend on food [as a proportion of income] has stopped and we are seeing a significant and fundamental shift in priorities.’
This could represent a significant shift in [...]
The freeview platform says it has overtaken Sky as the largest digital TV platform in the UK, according to the online media news service mediatel.co.uk. Their news service Newsline reports that 1.7m Freeview boxes were sold in the first quarter of 2007, of which 500,000 went to homes new to digital. The Freeview platform [...]
