COLUMNISTS
Resources
Principal content
John Kay has been writing a column on economics and business since 1995. His academic career has included chairs at London Business School and Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is currently a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He also had a career in the policy world which established the Institute for Fiscal Studies as one of the most respected think tanks, and a business career in which he established, developed and sold a substantial consulting firm and in which he has been a non-executive director of Halifax plc and several companies.
John has published many books, including Foundations of Corporate Success (1993), The Truth About Markets (2003) and The Long and the Short of It: Finance and investment for normally intelligent people who are not in the industry (2009). His latest book, Obliquity: Why our goals are best achieved indirectly, was published by Profile Books in March 2010.
- -
In love as in equities, we are fooled by randomness
Men thought about sex 19 times a day. So should we correct ‘every seven seconds’ to ‘on average, once every waking hour’?, wonders John Kay
Spontaneity or slogans: the lessons of Václav Havel’s greengrocer
Vacuous rhetoric traps the leaders as well as the led. They are inhabitants of a world whose assumptions are false, writes John Kay
Taverna talk of fiscal union will remain just that
Markets cannot easily be bullied or lobbied, and their threat is effective. Fiscal rules have none of these advantages, writes John Kay
It is madness to follow a martingale betting strategy
Martingales and related strategies are the familiar currency of financial markets, writes John Kay
Horses for courses: picking market models
These methods provided a misleading account of the events that gave rise to the 2007-08 financial crisis, writes John Kay
A wise man knows one thing – the limits of his knowledge
Good models are simplifications, not black boxes whose workings are incomprehensible even to their operators, writes John Kay
It’s madness to follow a martingale betting strategy in Europe
The wise person’s reaction to the casino is not to go there; if you do, leave while you are ahead, and if you cannot do so, accept a small loss, writes John Kay
We need a fox to see the snares and a lion to scare the wolves
I should not be prime minister, but I would like to imagine that I could be useful to someone who was. (Sorry David Cameron, I am otherwise engaged), writes John Kay
What Bob Diamond really tells us about the City
The emergence of Barclay’s chief as the face of London shows how the UK’s indigenous investment banking has all but disappeared, says John Kay
Capitalism need not be about greed and gambling
“Capitalism should be replaced by something nicer,” reads a slogan outside St Paul’s encapsulating the incoherence of the protests at Wall Street and the City of London
