Lee Kuan Yew, who died recently, was a pretty remarkable politician. He led Singapore first into and then out of the Malaysian Federation...

“Wooooo!!!” said Alice, “there’s going to be an election in Wonderland. What fun that’ll be! All those clever politicians setting out...

My old boss in the 1990s was fond of telling us that regulation and transparency were a good thing for our business. It was slightly...

I was not a watcher of the 1980s TV soap opera “Dallas” (in fact, I’ve never seen it at all), but I’m sure many readers were. But even...

What to make of the nickel market? This time last year it was roaring up, fuelled by the growing certainty of a ban on the export of ore...

Nineteenth century Germany produced many industrial powerhouses, in mining, chemicals, manufacturing – in fact, in all sorts of different...

The end game of politics is to be elected (at least in democracies; the technique amongst totalitarians is somewhat different, although,...

Starting on my own in 1993, one of my first acts was to employ a Russian speaker. Her name was Luba, only recently out of school and...

The stories of the Second World War were all about the big battles, the headline events of the clashes of men and materials; the Battle...

Are rules legally binding? What is evasion? What is avoidance? What has ‘moral repugnance’ got to do with tax bills? At the beginning of...

If you happen to have caught the Netflix wave, or got the box-set, you might have seen House of Cards, the US political satire transposed...

Market action so far this month has been more than many (frankly, including me) might have expected for the whole of the year. While the...

Political leadership has at least as much to do with illusion as reality; what the adage about fooling people really means is as long as...

After seeing China in the headlines for a long time, the plummeting oil price and the sinking rouble have put Russia right back in the...

Financial exchanges in the US and the UK were for years and years actually quite different sorts of animal; in the US, the profit motive...

A few themes seem to have swum into focus during 2014; let’s first consider the idea that there is a developing gap between the...

Today is Christmas Eve, the day above all when God and mammon truly compete for our attention; last minute Christmas shopping – and today...

There’s a chill wind swirling around this Christmastime. Anybody who was thinking that the chaos wrought by the 2007/08 crisis might have...

It almost seems that you can’t turn round at the moment without coming up against a  new LME initiative. RMB-denominated mini contracts,...

It’s generally accepted that the USA has more lawyers per head of population than any other country, although some authorities give that...