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“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation,” said Alan Greenspan in the 1960s. Yes, that Alan Greenspan – before he became one of the principal architects of the easy-money policies that helped fuel bubbles and price rises. The 40th anniversary of the advent of the pound coin, now worth just 30p, is a depressing reminder of our collective loss of purchasing power in the fiat-money era, which Dominic elucidates on page 27. On a more encouraging note, the anniversary also reaffirms equities’ key role in fending off inflation over the long term. Investment platform AJ Bell calculates that a £1 investment in a UK growth fund would be worth £10.02 after inflation, while if you had put the £1…

“You can count the number of high-profile technology companies that have chosen London over Wall Street on one hand, and nearly all of them have been a spectacular flop… Deliveroo, a takeaway food app with an army of kamikaze moped drivers, and The Hut Group, which sells protein shakes online, spring immediately to mind… the biggest problem is the government’s seemingly unshakeable obsession with Britain becoming the next Silicon Valley… Britain needs an alternative plan. When it comes to technology companies we cannot compete with New York… We must focus on what this country does best… Britain is a world leader in life sciences, green power, and the creative industries… but we are also at the forefront of banking, services, defence, mining and energy, areas that are too often sidelined…

Shell has announced record first-quarter earnings and another $4bn of share buybacks, says Tom Wilson in the Financial Times. Higher trading earnings and liquefied natural gas (LNG) production helped offset lower oil and gas prices. Adjusted earnings of $9.6bn exceeded analysts’ expectations. New CEO Wael Sawan, who took over in January, has promised to “focus on performance” and return at least 20%-30% of its cashflow to shareholders in a bid to close the valuation gap between Shell and its US rivals. Shell’s results, which follow unexpectedly high profits from rival BP, may be great for shareholders, but not everyone is happy, says Jillian Ambrose in the Guardian. Critics have accused the company of a “profiteering bonanza” and urged the government to levy further taxes. In response, Shell argued that it…

Strong brands help companies push through price rises in an inflationary environment, says WirtschaftsWoche. One promising stock in this context is Monster Beverage, which specialises in energy drinks, a fast-growing sector in which it is the second-largest global player, with a foothold in 149 countries. Red Bull has 43% of the market and Monster accounts for 39%. The group has been expanding for 30 years, constantly testing new flavours and products. It has proved adept at complementing its global offerings with cheaper alternatives in markets where consumers have relatively little purchasing power. A recent acquisition will allow it to cash in on the trend towards alcoholic fizzy drinks.…

The new Public Order Act was used by the Metropolitan Police to arrest six protestors on Coronation Day, despite the group having liaised with police before the event, says Zoe Crowther on Politics Home. The six demonstrators from the Republic campaign group, which included leader Graham Smith, were released without charge, with the Met expressing “regret” for the arrests. On Saturday there were 64 arrests under the act, which passed into law just days earlier despite “criticism from experts, liberty groups and opposition MPs”. The six were arrested under the new act on suspicion of intention to “lock on”, although the “equipment” turned out to be luggage straps for gathering placards, says Owen Jones in The Guardian. This offers an “instructive lesson about how freedom is lost”. History…

Since it launched nearly two years ago, the television station GB News has not exactly steered clear of controversy. The channel was intended as a kind of British version of Fox News, the US news channel for right-wingers. Some thought it would struggle to even get on air, given Ofcom’s rules on impartiality in broadcast television, and a social-media campaign that attempted to shame companies who advertised on it. Then, two weeks after it launched in June 2021, its flagship presenter, Andrew Neil, walked away from the channel, never to return. Since then, it has had its knuckles rapped by the regulator several times, most recently over comments on the Covid vaccines made by the author Naomi Wolf. It has also faced direct competition from Talk TV, a rival with…

Ever since OpenAI launched its groundbreaking ChatGPT tool, machines that come close to replicating the power of the human mind have become the most significant new technology since the launch of smartphones almost two decades ago. It remains to be seen whether software can genuinely replicate human quality work, or just come up with a slightly rubbish facsimile of it. Even so, there is no question that the technology has lots of potential. There is already a backlash against it. Writers in Hollywood have gone on strike, partly over the use of chatbots to create scripts. In the UK, the Society of Authors has criticised a literary festival that used a machine to create images. Patrick Vallance, until recently the government’s chief scientific adviser, has suggested there should be some…

Gross domestic product (GDP) is a measure of the size of an economy over a period of time (normally a year). GDP is most often used for discussing individual countries, but may also be calculated for regions (eg, southeast Asia), trading blocs (eg, the European Union), or areas within a country. GDP is calculated in three ways. The production or output approach is the sum of all the value added through producing goods and providing services (ie, the market value of what’s produced minus the costs of producing it). The income approach is the sum of all the income earned by companies and individuals from offering the same goods and services. The expenditure approach is the sum of everything spent on finished goods and services. In theory, all three should…

“When we started to take on the cheating, the pass rate dropped from 95% to 49%. I said I was just going to do what was right and probably would not survive long. Everyone was angry. Parents were angry that they couldn’t pay money to the teachers. The teachers were angry because they didn’t get the money. And the kids were angry because they didn’t have their diplomas. This was for two years. Then people started to realise this was tough but there was no other way.” Moldovan president Maia Sandu (pictured) on tackling bribery relating to school-leaving exams when she was education minister in the early 2010s, quoted in the FT “A lot of the time, there’s a safety in not having any money, because no one can take…

edwest.substack.com The most desirable cities in the world, and the happiest towns in Britain, are all characterised by “gentle density”, says Ed West – the phrase coined by Nicholas Boys Smith of Create Streets to describe the sort of urban environment most people prefer to live in. Think three- or four-storey buildings, traditional architecture, beautiful but liveable neighbourhoods. Research suggests such environments contribute to our wellbeing and make us happy. This suggests a role for our new King. The housing crisis is the number one problem facing British society and increasing the supply of areas characterised by gentle density is the “most workable solution”. Charles has long had a passion for architecture, something for which he has been mocked by high-status “midwits”. But being royal, he is unconcerned with status…

We can trace the roots of insurance back to the 18th century BC, but the modern market is widely accepted to have started 335 years ago in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in the City of London. Lloyd’s coffee house became a meeting point for ship captains, ship owners and merchants, and, gradually, an informal market evolved whereby merchants would offer to reimburse ship owners for the loss of the ships and cargoes on a particular voyage in return for an up-front payment, or premium. This wasn’t the only coffee house doing brisk business in the city at that time. Jonathan’s coffee house became a prominent destination for exchanging stocks and shares in the late 1600s, eventually becoming the London Stock Exchange. Payments for the protection of cargo weren’t a novelty:…

You can’t pick up a newspaper nowadays without a reference to artificial intelligence (AI), and investors are keen to get in on the action. But for the most part, it’s still hard to buy into the AI craze. For example, more and more professional advisers are telling me their clients are asking how they can own shares in ChatGPT. The answer is that you can’t, since it’s developed by OpenAI, a non-profit research institution – although Microsoft is a major backer. Instead, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are shaping up to be the easiest way to invest in this theme. Total assets under management in the top US-listed AI ETFs have increased by 37% over the past six months. Quantitative analysts at investment bank Société Générale have scanned through the portfolios of…

Last autumn, a series of reports about people having their bank accounts emptied in a very specific way shone a rather disturbing light on mobile-banking security. A thief or group of thieves was breaking into lockers at gyms across London to steal bank cards and mobile phones while their owners were exercising. They were then able to use the cards to go on shopping sprees at stores such as Apple and Harrods. Some of the victims reported that their banks were initially unwilling to refund them, saying that the criminals had used their PIN code, so they must have been at fault (eg, by keeping a note of the code with their cards). Later the banks gave in as it became clear that the problem was not their customers’ carelessness,…

Despite efforts to tackle scammers, pension fraud remains rampant. As many as one in four pension savers are at risk of an attack, according to helpandadvice.co.uk, a consumers’ adviser. It asked savers considering transferring their pensions to alternative providers to answer some basic questions about the proposed transaction; a quarter of these transfers raised red flags that might indicate a fraud. For those who fall victim to a scam, there is little chance of getting the money back. In fact, new data reveals that fewer than a third of more than 4,000 pension fraud cases reported to Action Fraud in the past eight years have even been passed on to the police. The key, therefore, is to sidestep fraud in the first place. And the good news here is that…

“The UK trades at a 30% discount to global markets; this is an attractive time to invest” The TM CRUX UK Special Situations Fund contains mostly mid- and small-caps and targets capital growth over the long term. We have traditionally done best when the stockmarket recovers and we like to buy long-term growth companies when times are difficult. This has proved very profitable for us over 17 years: over this period we have returned 10.4% versus 6.2% for the IMA UK All Companies sector. Performance has been highly biased towards recovery periods and we delivered 168% and 150% returns in the recoveries of 2009 and 2020. The UK trades at a 30% discount to global equities. We think large companies such as Shell, Glencore and Legal & General have great…

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the US financial watchdog, has paid an anonymous whistleblower $279m, says The Economist – a record windfall from a scheme set up in 2010 following the SEC’s failure to stop the $64.8bn Ponzi scheme masterminded by Bernie Madoff (pictured). Awards of 10% to 30% are paid for tips that result in fines over $1m, with $1.3bn having been awarded to 328 whistleblowers to date. This has led to law firms hiring former SEC employees, and analysts sifting through data for tips. A record 760 cases were filed last year. The SEC has so far collected $6bn from misbehaving corporations, but of the 52,000 tips submitted from 2011-2021, only 0.5% are thought to have led to awards. Exactly who received the $279m and for what…

Dubai is emerging as “a major energy-trading hub”, says Bloomberg. Long focused on oil, the emirate is branching out into other raw materials following last year’s European and Swiss sanctions against Moscow. Many traders of Russian raw materials have rushed to set up in the Gulf. “We have seen well-known hedge funds recently open offices in Dubai, as well as independent commodities merchants,” says Jonathan Funnell of business consultancy Sidley Marion. Low taxes, proximity to major oil and gas producers and a favourable time zone, which enables traders to get ahead of the European market open, are all attractive. Still, for now Dubai remains a smaller commodity trading centre than London, Singapore and Geneva. More broadly, commodity trading is a growing business, say consultants at McKinsey. The energy transition and…

Gold is back within touching distance of its 2020 all-time high of $2,072. The yellow metal soared in 2020 as the US Federal Reserve unleashed a wave of ultra-loose money in response to pandemic disruption. That prompted investors to look for protection from inflation. Prices spiked again in March last year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but gold subsequently fell back as higher US interest rates rose. Higher rates increase the relative appeal of alternatives that pay an income, such as bonds. Now the gold market has again picked up steam amid resurgent Chinese demand, a buying spree by non-Western central banks and jitters over the state of regional US banks, says Harry Dempsey in The Financial Times.…

Warren Buffett’s successor at Berkshire Hathaway was the main topic of discussion at the conglomerate’s annual meeting last Saturday, says Bloomberg’s Max Reyes. The 92-year-old faced “question after question” about the topic. Buffett reaffirmed that he was “100% comfortable” with the decision to name Berkshire’s vice-chair for non-insurance operations Greg Abel as “heir apparent”. Buffett expects a “largely business-as-usual transition” when the time comes for him to step down from running Berkshire, as he believes that Abel “understands capital allocation as well as I do”. Many investors are less sanguine, says Lauren Silva Laughlin on Breakingviews. They are concerned about the fact that Buffett’s shares, which give him special rights when it comes to voting on company decisions, won’t immediately convert into ordinary shares. Whoever controls these shares will therefore…

The logistics division of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba, Cainiao Network Technology, is reportedly planning an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong in early 2024, says Reuters. It is hoping to raise $1bn-$2bn. Cainiao, which started out in 2013 as an amalgamation of logistics firms to support Alibaba’s online marketplace, now provides software and data for warehouses and logistics companies. It is growing rapidly: sales grew by a fifth year on year in the nine months to 31 December 2022. Hong Kong’s listings market is gradually recovering from a lacklustre year. Flotations have raised $1.5bn so far this year, compared with $1.2bn in the same period of 2022.…

● Nationwide Building Society is likely to announce record profits later this month, says Patrick Hosking in The Times. Unlike the rest of the UK’s biggest lenders, it’s owned by its members, so there are “no dividend-hungry shareholders to satisfy… all the profits stay in the business”. In theory, they get recycled to its borrowers and savers through better rates, but “the gravy keeps piling up” – the core capital ratio was a “stratospheric” 25.5% at the half-year mark. Excess capital gives it a cushion to absorb future loan losses, but that’s starting to look like an inefficient balance sheet. Attempts to diversify into backing housebuilding and financial technology firms have yet to pay off. CEO Debbie Crosbie (pictured), who was hired from TSB last year, is aiming to “polish…

Sebastian Lyon, founder, Troy Asset Management In the short term, inflation is likely to keep moderating, says Sebastian Lyon, founder of Troy Asset Management and co-manager of the £1.9bn Personal Assets Trust. The problems in the US banking sector will reduce the supply of credit, especially for small businesses and commercial real estate. “Nothing about credit contraction spells higher growth or higher prices.” However, over the longer term, the inflationary trends of the last two years are here to stay, due in part to greater bargaining power for workers. “There’s the noise of commodities and oil and food prices, but the thing that sustains inflation over longer periods of time is wages,” he tells Bloomberg. “Capital has had a fantastic time for the last three decades” but now “it’s labour’s…

unherd.com In this “oppressive era of hushed voices”, conservatives and classical liberals are urging us to rediscover the wisdom of John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty is widely deemed to be a rallying cry in favour of free speech. The reality is that Mill would have been on the side of the “new progressive hegemony”, says Patrick Deneen. Mill’s was not an argument in favour of free speech as an end in itself, but rather a means toward a further end: “regime change”. He hoped to overturn the custom-bound society of Victorian England and the traditional civilisation of the West more broadly and usher in instead the very progressivism that now dominates the major institutions of the West. Rather than look to Mill, those seeking to “resist progressive totalitarianism” should,…

Tom Haynes wrote an interesting piece in The Telegraph the other day to mark the 40th birthday of the pound coin. “The pound in your pocket is now worth just 30p”, ran the headline, followed by the subheading: “Some 40 years after the first pound coins were minted, their relevance is waning.” I’ll say! But the pound has actually lost a lot more than 70% of its value, and the article’s own statistics demonstrate that. “The average house cost £27,386, compared to £290,000 today,” says Haynes. I make that a fall of more than 90%. A first-class stamp was 16p. Now it’s £1.10. That marks depreciation of over 85%. A pint of London Pride cost 58p. Good luck finding it below a fiver today outside of Wetherspoons – another 90%…

Activist investors like to claim they’re campaigning for better returns on behalf of all shareholders, but any improvement tends to be short-lived, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs. On average, stocks targeted in 2,100 shareholder campaigns since 2006 outperformed their sector by three percentage points in the week after the campaign began. However, after six months median returns turned negative, and after 24 months the median return was -13%. While these numbers support the argument that activists are only out to make a quick buck, they also illustrate how hard it is to turn around a struggling business, say the analysts. After all, most activist targets start as underperformers and revert to form after the activist sugar rush.…

In general, an announcement that a government plans a “crackdown” is bad news. It’s usually a sign that they’ve run out of useful ideas and think that literally or metaphorically busting a few heads might help get voters back on side. Still, it’s hard to dismiss the case for a ban on cold calls selling financial products, which ministers trotted out last week. One of the few ironclad rules in money is that if anybody calls you (or emails or texts) with an unmissable opportunity, you should give it a miss. There’s already a explicit ban on selling pension products via cold calls, but no responsible firm should still sell any financial products this way even when technically permitted. Now the message that such calls are always scams will be…

Will your employer soon offer you a new type of workplace pension scheme? Royal Mail has become the first organisation in the UK to set up a collective defined-contribution (CDC) scheme for staff, with pension experts predicting these arrangements are set to become commonplace. CDC pensions are popular in Europe, but the UK has only just passed legislation enabling employers here to set them up. The schemes represent a halfway-house between the once-ubiquitous defined-benefit pension schemes and the defined-contribution plans that have increasingly replaced them. In defined-benefit schemes, your pension is guaranteed to be worth a set amount when you retire; in a defined-contribution scheme, by contrast, what you get is not fixed – it depends on factors such as the investment returns your savings earn. A CDC, meanwhile, aims…

One of the quickest Federal Reserve tightening cycles on record may be over, says Albert Edwards of Société Générale. The US central bank has raised interest rates by 5% since March last year after it belatedly “realised that... inflation wasn’t so transitory after all”. Many “seemingly reasonable people” still seem to believe that the Fed will take “the economy to the Shangri-la of a soft-landing” (where inflation falls without causing a recession). That “fabled land is often spotted by economists but seldom actually visited... the US is no Shangri-la”. Last week the Fed raised interest rates by another quarter of a percentage point to a range between 5% and 5.25%. That marks a 16-year high for US rates, but officials signalled “they might be done increasing them for now”, says…

Adidas’s turnaround is “off to a good start”, says Tim Loh on Bloomberg. While the sportswear giant still expects to lose €700m this year, its sales of €5.3bn in the first quarter were ahead of analysts’ expectations. Business was stronger in Latin America and parts of Asia, while the company is “ramping up production” of the classic Samba, Gazelle and Campus sneakers, which have recently been in “high demand”: they have been “appearing on the feet of celebrities including Bella Hadid and Kylie Jenner”. Not so fast, says Aimee Donnellan on Breakingviews. The bounce in Adidas shares “partly reflects the low expectations of Adidas’s investors”, whose shares have slipped by 50% in two years. Blame a scandal involving Kanye West, who designed Adidas’s lucrative Yeezy line of trainers. West’s antisemitic…

Three to buy GSK The Telegraph Management is building up the “all-important pipeline” of new treatments, spending £5.5bn on research and development (R&D) last year. GSK has received regulatory approval for 20 new drugs in the past five years, with a particular focus on the potentially lucrative areas of infectious diseases, HIV, immunology and oncology. The Haleon spin-off has left the balance sheet looking “less stretched” than before. On 11 times earnings – a big discount to peers – and yielding 4%, the shares are “tempting”. 1,455p MJ Gleeson Shares This Sheffield-headquartered housebuilder specialises in affordable homes across the north and the Midlands. Many of its customers are also first-time buyers who stand to gain amid reports that the government is considering a new Help to Buy scheme. The shares…

Pakistan’s former president Imran Khan, who was ousted in a no-confidence vote last year, was arrested by paramilitary troops earlier this week in a “significant escalation of a yearlong political standoff that has put the South Asian country on edge”, says CNN. Khan now faces charges of corruption, but the move has infuriated his supporters, leading to “deadly and unprecedented clashes”. The authorities have blocked access to the internet “in an attempt to quell the chaos”. Khan (pictured) is seen as the most divisive man in Pakistan, says Hannah Ellis-Petersen in The Guardian, and he is at the centre of “an unprecedented political, economic and constitutional crisis that is tearing the country apart”. To his supporters he is “the anti-establishment saviour that Pakistan has long been waiting for”; others blame…

There’s always an analyst who can spin a bearish tale in the middle of a boom, or tell you that stocks will keep going up even as the market teeters on the edge. The finance business has an inherent, natural bullishness: equities tend to go up more often than down anyway. Thus the permabears tend to be fewer and stand out more clearly, but permabulls are no less committed to their world view. What’s unusual in today’s market is that neither side has the best of the argument. Both can point to trends that strongly support their story – sometimes even the same data. Take the oil price, for example. Brent crude has fallen from roughly $114 per barrel last June to as low as $71 last week. It dropped…

Fattening up America’s farmers Editorial The Washington Post Recent data shows there’s enough food in the US to “meet everyone’s minimum calorific needs almost twice over” while net farm income is projected to be 26% above the 20-year average this year, says The Washington Post. Yet Congress is “gearing up” to reauthorise America’s agricultural safety net, the Farm Bill, conceived to help farmers cope with the Great Depression. For reasons “both of fairness and spending control”, the system, which results in a “disproportionate share of the benefits” flowing to high-income farmers, requires an overhaul. Take the “lavishly subsidised insurance” (the government pays about three-fifths of premiums), which reduces incentives to mitigate risks and improve the resilience of the land. A scheme to protect farmers against “truly catastrophic disasters” might be…

bondvigilantes.com For more than 15 years, all the talk has been about QE – central-bank money printing. The “huge final dose” was administered in response to the Covid crisis. Now, says Richard Woolnough, that money is being “cancelled”. What will the effect be? Economic theory suggests that printing money causes rising prices – increasing the supply of something will reduce its value, all else being equal. The idea that the theory must be in some way mistaken came about when the first doses of QE, administered in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, did not lead to rising prices. The policy therefore became more acceptable. But the evidence of late suggests the theory was right all along. US inflation has tracked money supply growth closely, with an 18-month…

“Lloyd’s has a reputation for insuring things that others won’t” The City of London is one of the world’s most important financial centres, especially when it comes to insurance. I’m not talking about the general insurance market (covering cars or health, for instance), but the global one for large business-insurance policies and reinsurance. This type of insurance is the oil that keeps the wheels of the global economic machine moving. Without it, trust would dissolve and the economy would be far more volatile. The Global Cities Report of 2021 notes that London is the only city in the world where every top-20 insurance and reinsurance firm has a base. The insurance sector comprised 24% of the City’s GDP in 2020, according to the London Market Group, which represents insurers and…

■ A portfolio of stocks picked by ChatGPT has beaten some of the UK’s best-selling funds since the beginning of March, says the Financial Times. Finder, a personal finance comparison site, used the artificial intelligence (AI) tool to create a portfolio of 38 stocks on 6 March 2023, based on the screening criteria used by the ten most popular funds on the Interactive Investor investment platform. These criteria included things such as low levels of debt and a strong competitive advantage. The tool selected some of the biggest names in the S&P 500 such as Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and Visa as the top holdings, and it has outperformed the top ten most popular funds for 34 of the 39 market days to 2 May. In the eight weeks since…

● Skipton Building Society has launched a new deposit-free mortgage aimed at renters, says The Guardian. The “Track Record” mortgage will lend up to 100% of the value of the property (to a maximum of £600,000) to first-time buyers who have paid 12 consecutive months of rent and household bills during the past 18 months. Payments under the mortgage must be less than they have been paying in rent. The initial interest rate is 5.49%, fixed for five years, and the maximum term is 35 years. The rate is higher than the average five-year fix, which is now 5%, but will still appeal to buyers who can’t save up a five-figure deposit or get help from family. Unlike the handful of other no-deposit deals on the market, Skipton’s mortgage does…

● Labour Party analysis of official data suggests that 1.3 million Britons did not receive their full state-pension entitlement last year. They missed out on £530m owing to errors made by the Department for Work and Pensions. The scale of the problem underlines the need for older people to check what they’re receiving very carefully. If you’re in any doubt that your payments are correct, contact the government’s Pension Service, or seek independent advice. ● The total value of tax refunds paid by HM Revenue & Customs to savers who have paid too much tax on their pensions now exceeds £1bn. The problem stems from the inability of HMRC’s computer systems to recognise that the first withdrawal people make from private pensions may not be followed by equally sizeable subsequent…

David Tepper was born in New Jersey in 1957 and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh before doing an MBA at Carnegie Mellon University (Carnegie’s business school is now named after him). He worked briefly as treasurer for Republic Steel before moving to Keystone Mutual Funds then Goldman Sachs. He rose to head of trading, making large sums of money for Goldman in the aftermath of the 1987 crash, but was repeatedly passed over for promotion to partner. He quit in 1992 to set up his own hedge fund, Appaloosa, with Goldman bond salesman Jack Walton. What was the trade? Tepper was one of the first to grasp the seriousness of what would become the great financial crisis of 2008, liquidating his fund’s position well before the collapse of Lehman…

2020 Crozes-Hermitage, Domaine des Lises, Equis, Northern Rhône, France (£27.95, yapp.co.uk, 01747 860423) It is interesting how rapid change is in the wine world as vintages tick by with alarming and seemingly ever-increasing frequency. But while – through one lens – the evolution of our trade is dynamic and exciting, some things never change. In 1988, my first trip to Paris, under my own steam with monies saved from my first job in wine, was life-changing. It was here that I tasted some of the cornerstone wines that form the base on which all of the flavours from all of my tastings ever since have been assembled. One such enlightening bottle was the first-ever release of Alain Graillot’s super-cuvée Crozes-Hermitage La Guiraude. To my naive mind, it was the definitive…

Crack-Up Capitalism Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy Quinn Slobodian Allen Lane, £25 In her brief time in Downing Street, Liz Truss developed a plan to “carpet-bomb Britain with investment zones” where “there would be no tiresome planning laws, no irksome regulations, minimal labour laws, little taxation and only the lightest veneer of democracy”, says Will Hutton in The Guardian. The idea was dropped when Truss left office, but elements of her ideas live on in Jeremy Hunt’s plan to establish low-tax “freeports”. This is nothing new. Ever since the end of the Soviet Union, free marketeers have, says Quinn Slobodian, been trying to create “jurisdictions within jurisdictions” that “downplay all the adjuncts of political freedom”, including trade unions, obligations to the poor, opposition parties…