The recent announcement that the Bank of England considered £75bn of quantitative easing (Telegraph, 19 th October) raises the question of ‘what impact is £75bn going to have (a second round of quantitative easing) when so much has already been put into the nation?’. As I previously discussed, we face the problem of this money sitting static with the funds and banks rather than being invested on infrastructure projects which the nation so badly needs.
Is there now going to be Government pressure that will force the banks to distribute funds, particularly to small business, to revitalise the economy and increase employment? I suspect not! Will the government split retail banks from investment banks, so that the investment banks can take risk but without affecting everyone else and the retail banks provide the slow and steady platform that is needed? I don’t think this [...]

This article by Luke Johnson on the Financial Times website on why big businesses are bad for business, with the point made that the senior executives of these large organisations are very similar to public servants of large government departments, strikes a chord with me.
We are in a situation of assets being slowly controlled by fewer and fewer hands. More and more companies are interlinked through shared ownership structures, and are plagued with the bureaucracy of governance which is emerging more as protecting directors from prosecutions than actually following through on whether governance is really adding value.
Issues such as risk, vulnerability, bribery and corruption that occur outside the usual Anglo-American governance regimes is a major problem. All our studies indicate that 80 percent of business transactions outside European or American boundaries involve more than one bribe, or a substantial amount of bribery, [...]

Last post about Obama’s BlackBerry–I promise. The issue of Obama using a special BlackBerry as a tool to lead has remained in the press even after Obama has settled into office. On a recent interview on American TV, Obama joked that his BlackBerry turns into a car . [...]

From a recent article in the FT:
In an analysis entitled Turning the Tide, Deloitte yesterday said central and local government must seize the opportunity “to take radical steps to emerge as leaner, more commercially savvy entities”. In practice, it argued, the downturn “provides a chance for public sector organisations to drive through reforms they could not necessarily achieve in more prosperous times”. [...]