Writes anonymously on the political economy of British professional services.
Insurance
Every financial structure is a set of relationships: who contributes, who collects, who can leave. In the bulk annuity market, the parties contributing most — the pensioners — cannot negotiate, cannot exit, and were never sent a bill to refuse.
Insurance
A working guide to the actual calculation of the matching adjustment and the fundamental spread — the projection, the equivalent yield, the deduction, and the four places where judgement enters. With worked figures throughout.
Insurance
Britain's corporate pension promises are migrating, at £40–50 billion a year, onto insurance balance sheets built around one contested number. The supervisor said the number was wrong and was overruled.
Insurance
The fees buried inside offshore life reinsurance are growing because the structure is doing exactly what it was built to do. We can be confident of that, because we have watched the same thing happen before — and, once, watched a regulator stop it.
Government
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.
Tax
The VAT on private school fees is a regressive muddle. If the government wanted fairness in education, it would have ended academic selection instead.
Government
Why statutory audit should be a public function, not a private profit centre
Engineering
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.
Banks
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
Government
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
Banks
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.
Tax
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.