Offshore reinsurance
Offshore Reinsurance Outsourcing to Yourself
A new number on offshore life reinsurance describes a cost. Read it again and it describes the point.
C.J. Marsden
Writes anonymously on the political economy of British professional services.
National Grid
National Grid - Gilts Plus a Margin
National Grid has sold the Isle of Grain. The interesting question isn't who bought it — it's why every electricity bill in the country carries a permanent premium that exists for one reason: that the grid is owned by shareholders the public must pay to profit.
Grammar Schools
Taxing the Symptom
The VAT on private school fees is a regressive muddle. If the government wanted fairness in education, it would have ended academic selection instead.
Captive Audit
The Captive Audit
Why statutory audit should be a public function, not a private profit centre
Drone war economics
The Cost-Exchange Trap: How Cheap Drones Broke the Arithmetic of Air Defence
The headline numbers are arresting, but they describe the wrong problem. The real crisis in drone warfare is not a pricing problem — it is a reserving problem, and defenders are being forced into a hedging programme with permanently negative expected value.
Shareholder Capitalism
Shareholder Capitalism Is Not a Free or Fair Market
The story we are told Every economics textbook opens with the same fairy tale. Buyers and sellers meet as equals. Prices emerge from the honest collision of supply and demand. Anyone with a better product, a smarter idea, or a stronger work ethic can compete, win, and rise. The market
lawayer salary
The Doctor–Lawyer Asymmetry
Why one profession that heals is wage-controlled by the state while another profession that exists only to administer the state’s own laws is left to charge whatever the market will bear — and what the public stands to gain from changing it
Private Equity
The Conjuring Trick: Private Equity and the Manufacture of Value
PE's flattering story: buy tired firms, fix them, sell them fitter. It survives by omitting the mechanism — debt loaded onto the target, fees taken upfront, returns geared. Toys "R" Us was still profitable when it went bankrupt. The owners were paid for killing it. Not a bug. The design.
THE TAX TRAP · PART TWO
THE TAX TRAP · PART TWO But HMRC Says It Raised £4.2 Billion
The off-payroll headline is real. It is also a count of one channel — and HMRC tells you, in its own report, which channels it left out.
BPA
The matching adjustment, Thames Water, and the question the BPA market is not asking
On regulatory architecture, captured rent, and what happens when an infrastructure asset stops behaving like an infrastructure asset.
Capture and Captive Markets
How Britain Forgot How to Govern a Hospital
Four decades of NHS reform have been designed by people without relevant qualifications. The pattern is structural, not accidental — and the people best placed to fix it are systematically excluded from the rooms where decisions get made.
The Tax Trap
The IR35 Own Goal
How a tax crackdown enriched consultancies, hollowed out UK skills, and left HMRC empty-handed. Legislation designed to close a tax gap instead offshored specialist work and handed the Big Four a windfall they helped engineer.