The equalities bill

Lordy, more annoucements on yet another layer of bureaucracy to weigh down companies during the recession:

The government's equalities office is drawing up an amendment to the equality bill that would force companies to publish figures in annual accounts showing the number of men and women in particular pay bands. The bill is due to be published early this year.

More than just more bureaucracy: it's actually meaningless. Without knowing what jobs the various different people are doing we can't tell whether this means equal pay or not. For we do indeed have a...

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Public Broadband Infrastructure

There's a piece at CiF which I think rather fails in its major premise.
At the dawn of the digital era, during this first decade of the 21st century, the most important new commodity is internet access. A growing canon of research has documented the enormous benefits that accrue to those with broadband access (and the increasing detriments faced by those without it). Within many civil societies, in much the same way the agrarian revolution helped eliminate famine, the industrial revolution brought manufactured goods into everyone's lives and the computer era integrated machines (from laptops to PDAs...

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Daily Brief

When securities regulators head to the Hill later today for a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, the questions about who knew what about Bernie Madoff's operations when will surely be fired off with a dash of vitriol.

But one regulator won't be forced to answer those questions just yet: Mary Schapiro, Barack Obama's pick for new S.E.C. chairman. Rest assured, her time will come.

Schapiro runs Finra, the brokerage industry's self-regulatory organization. Since Bernard L. Madoff Securities was a registered broker-dealer, Finra was at least partially responsible for policing its operations.

According to a story in...

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Broken glass

Is Waterford Wedgwood luxury, or "masstige"? Either way, it's bust. Its $625 million in debt is essentially worthless, it's been losing money before interest payments for a couple of years now, and its prospects, as we enter another grim year for the retail market, have never been poorer.

My guess is that someone, somewhere, will pick up the iconic brands -- Waterford, Wedgwood, Rosenthal, Royal Doulton -- for a song, while laying off substantially all of the manufacturing capacity and laying plans to start over from scratch if and when the market in such things improves. While the...

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