The Independent recently highlighted the clash between Vince Cable and George Osborne over the reform of bankers’ bonuses. One bone of contention is Cable’s wish to make bonuses over £1million public. The real issue between the two here are concerns of the migration of capital, but this probably won’t make much difference. An article in Director covers Cable’s drive for responsible capitalism, however it is individual corporations that must be responsible, not just the financial services industry. At present, both the UK and US is hooked on short term shareholder value.
In recent research that we conducted it was estimated that £450 billion is awaiting investment in the City of London alone. The estimates for Wall Street range from $1 trillion to $2.8 trillion. The funds are waiting for investment and M&A when an opportunity that is considered sufficiently lucrative arises.  [...]

Recently I came across this article on CEO compensation in Slate by Ray Fisman. It’s a very interesting article, and the position Fisman takes, that CEOs and compensation committees usually do not enter into undue intrigue and backhand politics, is probably accurate.
Most compensation and nomination committees do take their jobs very seriously, and try to emerge with compensation packages that make sense. But the challenge they have faced and the challenge society continues to face is that of peer comparison. [...]

Once again it’s that dreaded time of year for Americans: tax time. And the issue of tax havens has reared its ugly head quite a bit recently, both on a global level at the recent G20 summit, where world leaders agreed to name and shame countries that haven’t agreed to international reporting standards, and in the UK, where Barclays was in the news for attempting to keep details of its tax havens secret from The Guardian.
Tax havens are a major political issue. European countries particularly would like to see them more stringently regulated, but I don’t think any new international agreements will do much good. The reason? Tax havens cannot be dealt with on an international basis until they are resolved on a national basis. One only needs to look so far as the United States to see why – there are major tax havens in [...]

Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist,  compared two studies . One said that happy workers are more successful, and the other said that sad workers are more productive. His conclusion:
Now, if you were to describe the job of a CEO versus the job of a lower level worker, I think you might say the CEO needs to be successful (as opposed to productive) whereas the lower level worker needs to be productive (as opposed to successful). Ideally, everyone should be both successful and productive, but in terms of importance, you would prefer a successful CEO over one who has more meetings, or however else you would measure “productivity” in that job. And a factory worker, for example, needs to be productive more than he needs to “succeed,” if success even has meaning in that sort of job.
So it follows from the science that [...]