Tim Worstall

A little story about that decline in British industry. Sadly, no, not about shipbuilding, rather, about crane building. Some of the changes that happened from the 70s onwards were simply inevitable. Doesn’t matter who was in power, they really were just going to happen. In the centre of Bath there used to be a crane [...]

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If production is moved to Bratislava, the new Bentley 4X4 will be built alongside other cars belonging to the Volkswagen Group such as the Porsche Cayenne, Audi Q7 and Volkswagen Touareg. Because they’re all rather the same car. Different bodywork, different trims, but underneath they are all built on exactly the same platform.

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One in five young people will need to become an engineer if the UK has any chance of addressing severe skills shortages and rebalancing the economy towards advanced manufacturing, new research has warned. This is complete nonsense. Manufacturing is some 12 or 13% of the entire global economy. The idea that we want to put [...]

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Contract killings and abductions are not uncommon in Russia’s business world, Fancy that!

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Let me highlight some of the features unique to the Mittelstand model that I believe everyone should learn from – and imitate if they can. OK. Taking on debt is treated with suspicion. What? Mittelstand companies are overwhelmingly privately owned, and thus largely free of pressure to provide shareholder returns. So they don’t use outside [...]

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There was a fresh crisis yesterday, after All Nippon Airways (ANA) joined its fellow Japanese airline Japan Airline in grounding its fleet of Dreamliners so it could carry out safety checks. It was a precautionary move from ANA, after one of its jets was forced into an emergency landing and evacuation outside Tokyo on Wednesday, [...]

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Music and film suppliers, who want to see HMV survive as internet retailers erode their margins, have been crucial to keeping HMV afloat. Mmm, yes, I can understand that. Old way of doing business would indeed prefer not to have their rent claiming ability wiped out by new technology. Chuka Umunna, Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary, [...]

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I do wish that people would get this right: The Chancellor’s family-owned interior design business, Osborne & Little, failed to contribute to the Exchequer last year as it recorded its fourth straight year of losses. There’s so many nonsenses mixed up in that statement. Firstly, the measure of success of a business is not whether [...]

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Let the drilling companies try extracting shale gas. If they fail, that’s their look-out. If they succeed, we will all benefit, because the price of energy will come down. In America they have driven down the cost so far that many shale gas companies are in trouble – too successful for their own good. The [...]

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New data has revealed that 11.3pc of the UK’s retail space is now standing empty. In entirely unconnected news internet sales are now some 12% of all retail spending.

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A new study suggests that in the past too many well off businessmen and business women have been given honours ranging from MBEs to knighthoods despite little evidence that they have put anything back into the community. However, the report from the campaign group Legacy10 says that honours should be explicitly linked to charity giving, [...]

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Now for the million-dollar question: What should excellent, creative, deadline-driven, ambitious, quick, detail-oriented, prolific, and skillful writers expect to be paid if this pain-in-the-ass content farm hires them? Why, “between .009 and .02 per word,” of course. Literally fractions of pennies. In Portland, where the living hourly wage is $9.42, according to MIT’s living wage [...]

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Wouldn’t get away with this in the Old Green Tree Mr. Wheatcroft: The real charge against Cameron isn’t Eton or Bullingdon but Carlton. Where someone of his background might once have spent his early manhood serving with the Coldstream, he spent his as a shifty PR man for a second-rate television company. That’s spot on [...]

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Ryanair has been forced to apologise to Italians after a crew member on a flight to the southern city of Bari reportedly described it as the “the city of the mafia and St Nicholas” in an on-board announcement. Which is to fly into an airport in roughly the same country but perhaps 100 miles away [...]

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Branson manages to lobby successfully. For that is my opinion of what’s happened here. Famous and rich man pulling political strings. This means that politicians who can be lobbied by rich men should have more power over business. Well done Willy, well done.

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Britain now producing MORE cars than Germany: Fun innit?

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German shipping experts say that two-thirds of the country’s marine fleet is in financial distress. If the crisis drags on much longer, the Greeks may leapfrog ahead to become world leaders in container shipping. The irony of prudent Greeks cleaning up after a reckless debt spree by the Germans is lost on nobody.

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An interesting view, eh? E&Y said that although companies are struggling, the number of administrations actually fell last year, despite a 42pc rise in profit warnings among listed companies. It said the mismatch could be explained by a change in attitude among the government and creditors, which have allowed more breathing space for businesses since [...]

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The warning came amid reports that one Cayman islands-based vulture fund, Dart Management, received almost 90pc of the €435m of debts that Greece repaid on Tuesday. The fund, founded by American tax exile Kenneth Dart, was one of those that refused the debt restructuring deal that saved Greece from default in March. It was one [...]

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A Sainsbury’s potato buyer accepted £5 million in corrupt payments from a key supplier, staying at Claridge’s and taking luxury holidays in return for a lucrative contract. I have worked in parts of the world where this is actually the point of contract negotiations. Who gets what slice in the middle. This is actually what [...]

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