Fisher Capital Management World News

The gloom on the economic effects stems largely from setting aside Friday as a holiday, at a cost of nearly $10 billion in lost productivity, not insignificant when slowly emerging from recession.

April 27, 2011|By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times
Roslynd Hadley is enough of a royalist that she’s happily hosting a garden party Friday to celebrate the much-anticipated marriage of Prince William to his college sweetheart, Kate Middleton.

But Hadley is also enough of a businesswoman to know that, though the wedding may buoy people’s spirits, it’s no boon to her company. Since the British government declared Friday a national holiday in honor of the event, cancellations of bookings for the day have cost her busing firm about $22,000 in lost business.

The financial services sector will no longer be able to offer staff retention bonuses, as a result of new payment guidelines from the Financial Services Authority (FSA).New rules put forth by the FSA attempt to align pay and other staff rewards with jeopardy, so as to avoid a situation where employees are given lucrative incentives to engage in potentially risky activities.

Jon Terry, remuneration partner for PwC, explained that the FSA has effectively “introduced the world’s toughest pay rules to the UK financial services industry” and warned that firms must take steps to comply before the June 30th deadline.



He added that while some measures will be welcomed by workers, but bonus restrictions are likely to be less popular.

KAI RYSSDAL: There is — if you really stop to think about it — one basic question behind all investing decisions: Is the return worth the risk?

So with that in mind, what about Wall Street itself? Does the financial system pass the test? That’s the basic idea behind our series Economy 4.0: how to make the global economy, including the financial system, work better for more people. Our special correspondent David Brancaccio has been in Bretton Woods, N.H., the past couple of days for a series of meetings and conversations about exactly that topic.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: The setting of our conversation was a round table in the grand hotel where debate in 1944 led to the Bretton Woods Agreement, which defined the financial system coming out of World War II. Eighty-year-old George Soros, investor and philanthropist, was part of a new conference he helped sponsor in recent days on what was advertised as “new economic thinking.”