Tim Worstall

Rupert Murdoch desperately battled to prop up the tumbling value of News Corporation on Tuesday, announcing plans for a $5bn (£3bn) share buyback. Maybe he just thinks the shares are cheap? And I would assume that none of the family’s shares would be tendered, so it would increase the family control as well, no?

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Mr. Chakrabortty doesn’t manage it. To him it’s all about the way in which the Derby train works are just a subsidiary of some Johnny Foreigner company. Toss. The contract was for a build and lease set of trains. Siemens has a higher credit rating than Bombardier. Thus the lease part of the contract is [...]

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Fred Done, whose Betfred bookie won the race for the Tote with a £265m bid, is continuing to resist paying five punters who placed bets showing profits of £823,000 with its Gibraltar-based online wing, Betfred.com. It has declared the bets void – even though it has paid out on wagers placed by UK punters in [...]

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Asked whether all companies listed in the UK potentially fall under the remit of the Bribery Act, he said: “Exactly. You bet we will go after foreign companies. This has been misunderstood. If there is an economic engagement with the UK then in my view they are carrying on business in the UK.” The Bribery [...]

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What decline? The bestselling shop-bought pizza in Italy, and indeed in 33 other countries around the world including Britain, is made by a German-owned food company on an industrial estate just off the M6 in Leyland, Lancashire. Sure, it’s not a Morris Minor we’re manufacturing, but manufacturing it is.

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A highlight: she’d have to install a pasteurizer even though she made her yogurt from milk that was already pasteurized. What’s more, California law makes it illegal to pasteurize milk twice, Hang them, hang them all.

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It’s quite wonderful how the narrative can change really, isn’t it? There we all were, only a couple of years back, being lectured that stock market capitalism was a bad thing. Lots of small shareholders, supine institutions, it just left management to do their own thing. What we really needed was a good dose of [...]

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Groupon: The adjusted CSOI measure is the one I find a little disturbing. This measure backs out “online marketing expense, acquisition-related costs and stock-based compensation expense.” Not counting online marketing expense seems, uh, ridiculous. The company writes that “online marketing expense primarily represents the cost to acquire new subscribers and is dictated by the amount [...]

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Ms Rosenfeld, who was paid $19.3m (£11.7m) last year, repeatedly refused to attend hearings of the Business, Innovations and Skills Committee to answer questions on the £11.5bn acquisition. MPs hoped to question Ms Rosenfeld about the U-turn which led to Kraft closing Cadbury’s Somerdale factory. Writing in Bloomberg Businessweek, Ms Rosenfeld said: “I’ve spent a [...]

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Film piracy is said to be costing the US economy over $20bn a year. Sigh, the usual lies. Everyone does this, from Microsoft talking about software, Luis Vuitton talking about luggage knock offs, Rolex about watches and yes, the film studios about online piracy. They all, without exception, count cut price knock offs as having [...]

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Well, obviously, I don’t actually know, but I can give a sketch of what’s likely. The basic situation is that Southern Cross operates but does not own a series of nursing homes for the retired/elderly. 30,000 odd residents, 45,000 odd staff. They’re in a squeeze. The major customer is the local authorities, who have a [...]

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The world is drowning in corporate fraud, and the problems are probably greatest in rich countries – those with supposedly “good governance.” Poor-country governments probably accept more bribes and commit more offenses, but it is rich countries that host the global companies that carry out the largest offenses. … Hardly a day passes without a [...]

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The sums of money spent in furthering Koch (pronounced like the drink coke, no matter how tempting it is to rhyme it with rock) interests and power are staggering. But what is most disturbing is how rapidly they are growing. In 2004, the CPI found, the Kochs spent a “mere” $857,000 on lobbying. In 2008, [...]

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No one can create a job Eh? There’s around 30 million jobs in the UK economy and each and every one of them was created by someone. Why, I even created a job myself a month ago. Admittedly it’s in the Portuguese economy, but it was still a job created. It’s true that politicians don’t [...]

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“And this is despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence that putting women on boards correlates with better business performance.” Therefore quotas are unnecessary. If having women on the board increases profits then profit maximising companies will put women on the board. That said greedy, manipulative, capitalist pig dog profit maximising companies do [...]

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As part of a package of legal reforms to be steered through the Spanish parliament this month, for any property being sold the local council will be obliged to provide a document stating clearly its boundaries, the category of land on which it stands, its access to services including water and electricity, and details of [...]

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OK, so the Gulf oil spill didn’t in fact cause gross or long lasting environmental devastation. Why? NOAA explained one reason for this in a report in August: “It is well known that bacteria that break down the dispersed and weathered surface oil are abundant in the Gulf of Mexico in large part because of [...]

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Sir Philip Green (born 15 March 1952) is a Monacan[1][2], British-born businessman with executive positions in Tina Green‘s companies, including the Arcadia Group. What’s even better is that it’s actually true, too.

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Another was a broader lesson about the nature of do-gooder ventures. “One of the things I realized . . . is how few success stories there are in websites or products or businesses that exist primarily for an altruistic purpose. Most of the time, the things that really change the world exist for something fundamentally [...]

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Yes, I know, strange question. But I’ve heard that there’s something, a treatment, machine, which the French use post partum which other peeps don’t. So what I’d like to do is track down a French gynecologist and thus find out a) whether this is true and then b) who makes them. Anyone got any ideas?

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