Sundays have never been quite the same since the demise of The Business. The pink-coloured newspaper had the best editorial pages of any UK newspaper but not enough of my fellow Britons thought that was enough and the newspaper closed.
The man who was responsible in large part for those great editorials was Allister Heath and he has been editing City AM for the last couple of years.
City AM's website has been pretty awful but it's now been upgraded and Allister's 'Editor's Letter' can now be read via this link. Do add it to your favourites. Alongside John Redwood and Andrew Lilico he is one of the most interesting economic commentators we have.
Here are quotations from his most recent three 'letters':
Wednesday: "The next bank that runs into trouble must be allowed to go bust; the perception that all the top institutions are too big to fail needs to be eradicated. Any future intervention must be limited to preventing systemic meltdown. It must also be made clear to the banks that next time bondholders as well as shareholders will be wiped out. With credit default swaps (CDS) markets becoming less opaque, the argument that the failure of a mid-ranking institution would take down the whole financial system is becoming far less plausible. It is imperative to create as much transparency about counterparties and risk as possible; that way failures could be managed without the kind of collective nervous breakdown we saw after Lehman Brothers last year."
Thursday: "Both Tories and Labour would cut real spending by the same overall amount, though the Tories would shield the NHS and foreign aid in return for deeper cuts elsewhere. I wish the Tories would contemplate more drastic cuts, but that is not the point. There is currently no clear blue waters between the parties. The debate would be greatly enriched if everybody were to acknowledge this."
Friday: "Anybody hoping for a sharp upturn in property prices will be bitterly disappointed. There is a large overhang of homes waiting to hit the markets when conditions recover. We won’t be returning to the ultra-loose conditions that fuelled the bubble, not least because so many lenders have permanently quit. And with the UK crippled by Gordon Brown’s higher taxes, bloated government, high costs and general mismanagement, net migration is unlikely to be as high in the years to come."
