Daily Brief

There has been much discussion in the blogosphere about whether Goldman Sachs should go private. (A good summary can be found here.) One could forgive such wistful thinking today, as shares of Goldman fell below its initial public offering price.

When Goldman went public in May 1999, at $53 per share, it was a watershed event. The firm was the last big Wall Street partnership to go public. The decision to go public had set off intense debate within the firm and ultimately led to the resignation of Jon Corzine, the co-chairman and co-chief executive who had pushed...

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Ugly

If you thought that the sudden sell-off from yesterday afternoon would reverse itself in morning trade, think again: this is looking increasingly like a secular down market rather than simply a case of high volatility. Citi's down further this morning, a vote of confidence from one of its largest shareholders notwithstanding; Berkshire Hathway's tumbling too; and Americans are now being laid off at the rate of more than half a million a week. Oh, and the market cap of the entire New York Times Company is now less than $1 billion, which is less than...

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Green economics

Oh please, not this stupidity again.

The Government provoked protests from campaign groups yesterday as it began Europe's first auction of carbon emissions permits but admitted that the proceeds would not necessarily be used to tackle climate change.

The Treasury said that it had raised £54 million through the sale of four million permits for £13.60 per tonne under the next stage of the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Yesterday's auction marked a departure from the policy of handing out the permits to industry for free. By 2012, in the second phase of the scheme,...

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Leading or reflecting?

This does rather pose the age old question about politics and politicians:

Ministers have been prevented from introducing an outright ban on paying for sex because they found that prostitution was too big a business and commanded too much public support.

Are they supposed to be visionary leaders who, as with the raising of children, do things which we disagree with but which they think will benefit us later?...

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Immigration drops

Back in late summer, the ever-perspicacious Vince Cable, predicted that “if we get into a serious recession, immigration will become negative, as it has before.” According to the Office for National Statistics, this has now come to pass, with data showing that immigration into Britain fell by 8.9 percent to 577,000 last year. Separate Home Office figures show the number from the eight eastern European nations including Poland that joined the EU in 2004 dropped for a fourth consecutive quarter.

At the same time, Eurostat - the EU’s statistical bureau - released immigration figures for 2006. These...

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