John Kay
speaker
106 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2010
last heard Jan 2013
John Kay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's a way you get money out of business.
But does this matter?
I think it matters a lot because we need to ask two questions, really.
What value does this activity add?
And why is it so profitable or apparently profitable?
Because if we have a group of people who are sitting in a room exchanging bits of paper with each other, then at the end of the day, the value of the bits of paper which they've exchanged with each other will be much the same as what they had at the beginning of the day.
And yet what this activity seems to be doing is attracting a lot of resource, both financial resource and people, who might be doing more useful things in the real economy.
And the other thing we need to worry about, and this is very much the theme of the parable of the ox, is whether this process is actually generating any real information about the underlying performance of companies, which is what we care about, rather than other people's guesses.
Because the original idea with the ox is you weigh the ox, and then in the parable... And that's an amusing game to guess what the true weight will be.
But if we stop measuring the true weight...
John Kay.
Both these things are true, and neither of them are a terribly big deal.
Public expenditure in Scotland is kind of 10% to 15% above the UK level.
And it's also true that Scotland would, if you allocated oil revenues on normal territorial principles...
get a very disproportionate share of total UK oil revenues.
But what these revenues are, of course, is very volatile and depends on the oil price.
But adjusting to whatever arrangements were made on that...
would not be a very big issue in relation to an independent Scotland.
And there would be other issues that would have to be negotiated if you were having a complete separation to do with allocation of UK existing government debt, to do with how you arranged existing state pensions across the jurisdictions and so on, which would be every big as these issues of expenditure and revenues would.
But the truth is, all of this is not a very big deal.
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