The cycles of names

Rowan Pelling discoers that names seem to run in fashions, possibly even in cycles.

Writing as someone who had to name a child in 2008, I am fascinated by prevailing trends in nomenclature. Anyone would think that Parliament had passed an Act decreeing that all girls had to be named after Edwardian scullery maids and all boys after Victorian stable lads. There are oodles of Rubys, Ellas, Graces and Lilys, and lashings of Jacks, Harrys and Alfies. You can't move at our primary school for tripping over Daisys and Archies.

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Capping interest rates

Nooooooo!

FSB national chairman John Wright said: "With base rates at 2pc and falling, the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England must look into capping interest rates charged on credit cards.

"A cap on interest rates will at a stroke not only reduce business costs but give consumers a real boost and cut the cost of borrowing."

The call came as the Business Debtline, a government-funded debt advice charity, said that the number of business owners calling for help had doubled compared with last year. Alongside its consumer debt advice...

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Sterling slip-slides away

Another day, another plunge for sterling - it's at E1.022 and the slide shows no sign of tailing off. The world is beginning to worry that the kids are running the sweet shop in the British economy - and that mum has gone to Iceland.  Well, not quite, but the Reykjavik-on-Thames scenario - while still very unlikely - is becoming vivid enough to cause alarm. So far this month, sterling is off 13% against the Euro and 16% against the Swiss Franc (probably the most stable currency right now). And today's...

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That's the end of free markets then, isn't it?

The current woes are used as a back up to the insistence that free markets are dead. We must not continue with this "neo-liberal" (a word that doesn't lend itself to spitting, but that's the way it's usually said, spat as a swear word) system, we must have more regulation, more planning, more rule of the feckless masses by the wise and omniscient.

Hmm, well, yes, although finding those wise and omniscient isn't actually as easy as all that. For example, if we accept the critique that people are not rational decision makers then where are we going to find...

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What you can get for $100 billion

We all know about the damage the credit crunch has wreaked on financial institutions, but this anecdote in Anatole Kaletsky's column today is still pretty astonishing:

"An even more spectacular case came to my attention in an e-mail I received in mid-November, when global stock markets hit their low-point (so far). Royal Bank of Scotland, my reader pointed out, spent $100 billion to buy ABN Amro, the second-biggest bank in the Netherlands, in October 2007. If only the directors of RBS had been a bit more patient, this is what they could have bought for the same

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