The reforms to financial regulation that followed the 2008 crisis have been dead wrong, argues Deri Hughes. Interventionism and subsidies for established banks have choked competition and added even more layers of protection for established banks than existed before. The answer is to take the state out of the money and banking business.
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Vuk Vukovic outlines the key deregulations that need to be made to kick-start small and medium business employment and spur on a jobs-led recovery.
Politicians claim that a single government block is needed to safeguard children online. However, as Dominique Lazanski argues, this ignores the wide range of market-based solutions that already exist.
We need a real market for corporate control, argues Elaine Sternberg. Private firms may have good reason to pay their executives highly, and shareholder sovereignty should be protected. The most important thing the government can do is to remove state restictions on shareholder power — and stop meddling in how private companies are run.
How one small change in mindset could free millions of SMEs from onerous regulation and tax by allowing more of their employees to register as self-employed.
What drives 750,000 people to the point of ruining everyone else's day by striking? PJ Byrne reflects on the "anger deriving from a wounded sense of self-worth" that drives so many people to strike.
In this report, five ex-regulators discuss their experiences and reflect on the successes and failures of the regulatory framework that followed the privatizations of the 1980s and 1990s. Regulation expert Tim Ambler concludes by discussing the future of regulation, and outlining the different paths that may be taken to reform the sector.
In this think piece, Jan Iwanik gives a response to the public consultation on the commitments to restrict the use of “What-If” and access to market information on the UK insurance market. The government cannot artificially engineer competition by restricting information between firms.
In this think piece, Karthik Reddy identifies the main problems in the UK aviation industry, particularly the government's regulation of airport slots which creates perverse incentives for airlines to waste these slots rather than sell or share them to use them efficiently. Reddy argues that deregulation of airport slots would reduce the artificial scarcity of these slots as well as other inefficiencies in the system caused by government regulation of aviation.
A report by financial analyst Nigel Hawkins detailing the £90bn worth of government assets that can be privatized between 2010–2015. The report argues that repeating the highly successful privatization campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s would raise much-needed funds to pay down part of the national debt, and would open up new sectors of the economy to competition.
The Adam Smith Institute is the UK’s leading libertarian think tank...
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