Guest-presenting The Bottom Line
It's a meaty discussion of business, a radio show, a TV programme - and a lot of fun. That's what I discovered about The Bottom Line when I got the chance to stand in as guest-presenter this week.
The idea of filming a radio show in an intimate corner of Broadcasting House may come to seem like a quaint detour on the road to a truly multi-media future. But right now, I'd say the hybrid format helps build a rapport with the guests that you can't get by sitting them in a big TV studio.
It certainly attracts the big names: this week I had Stelios Haji-Ioannou, chairman of Easygroup Ltd and founder of Easyjet, Lord Digby Jones, the former director of the CBI, and Steve Ridgway, the chief executive of Virgin Atlantic Airways.
We talked about how the airline industry was managing the global economic crisis, the future of air travel, the impersonalisation of business (or "why we all need to learn to love automated check-ins"), and much else besides.
You may be particularly interested to hear what Lord Jones had to say about Sir Alan Sugar's entry into the government.
You'll remember that when Gordon Brown first became PM he talked about a "Government Of All the Talents". Digby Jones was an early Goat, coming into the government as minister for trade promotion. He left after less than 18 months, having expressed some dismay about the limitations of working in bureaucracies. He was especially taken aback by not being able to get rid of anybody.
What does he think about the star of the Apprentice following his lead? Well, let's just say, he thinks the prime minister has picked the wrong goat.
With or without pictures, I think you'll enjoy the show. There's even a version for World Service, and a podcast.
As the regular presenter - my esteemed predecessor, Evan Davis - likes to say: "good conversation costs less on The Bottom Line."
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~34~RS~)
I'm 
© MMXI
Comments
Sign in or register to comment.
I hate to sound pernickety, but why do so many people feel the need to add the affirmation "it's a lot of fun" to what they are doing. Serious adult pursuits are not supposed to be a "lot of fun", are they? Or is the 21st Century mantra that we are all really children, and that nothing's so important to need to be taken seriously enough to take the fun away?
Complain about this comment
"You may be particularly interested to hear what Lord Jones had to say about Sir Alan Sugar's entry into the government.
You'll remember that when Gordon Brown first became PM he talked about a "Government Of All the Talents". Digby Jones was an early Goat, coming into the government as minister for trade promotion. He left after less than 18 months, having expressed some dismay about the limitations of working in bureaucracies. He was especially taken aback by not being able to get rid of anybody.
What does he think about the star of the Apprentice following his lead? Well, let's just say, he thinks the prime minister has picked the wrong goat"
Interesting BUT old news - see Poweromics blog http://poweromics.blogspot.com/2009/06/bringing-in-spin-and-bringing-in.html from nearly two weeks ago.
Thanks for highlighting your desire/plans to become a 'guest host' now (and how much fun it is), but what we really want to know is what 'Stephanomics' is actually about ... as traditional 'economics' is out-of-date and effectively 'dead' ... and Poweromics* and Ignoromics** have had their day too ... perhaps you could cover this on your 'economics' blog a little more, rather than straying into self promotion and politics (nb I thought Nick Robinson was meant to be covering this area).
David Clift, a Future 500 Leader
PS As you can imagine I also agree with comment 1 (ExcellenceFirst) too.
* Poweromics = People using position and power for their own personal gain, based on poor moral values, self interest and greed. Take a look at http://poweromics.blogspot.com for more information.
** Ignoromics = People are either effectively ignorant of the situation (e.g. the overall environment) or not prepared to take responsibility to make sure it changes for the better.
Complain about this comment
No.1. ExcellenceFirst
Why do you want to behave like a responsible adult?
What's wrong with being reckless and feckless?
In today's economy, the sensible are punished and the reckless and feckless are rewarded.
It's the way we live now.
Complain about this comment
Surely after recent events and relevations GOATs means Government Of All the Tainted!
Digby - jones clearly believes in the hire and fire method of management and now that A Sugar is 'joining' the civil service perhaps D - J should do the apprentice?
Complain about this comment
Well done, Stephanie, for sticking true to the real sustainability thing in the face of Digby Jones' polemical lecture as to what he thinks is good for the world. I have enjoyed his entertaining speeches as business guru. I think he was a lawyer with Edge Ellison / management consultant. He needs to restrain his dogmatic urges which he thinks serves a pro business agenda. Business would be better served if it embraces the concern, not belittle it. Just a view - and why not have fun?
Complain about this comment
"Digby Jones was an early Goat, coming into the government as minister for trade promotion. He left after less than 18 months, having expressed some dismay about the limitations of working in bureaucracies. He was especially taken aback by not being able to get rid of anybody".
The most telling statement on the page. Although the banks and financial services are in need of restructuring and playing by more honest rules the government is also in need of restructing and playing by new rules. The post-war bureauracies are not organized in any effective manner. Duplicative responsbilities have lead to no clear responsibilities. Private sector influence in the making of rules and regulations greatly outweighs the good of the public. The constant adding of sections to deal with this or that and being placed in inappropriate organizations to curtail any effectiveness and the hiring of personnel to get things done that ineffective personnel are paid to do has created a governments that keeps everyone busy but nothing gets done. Because a government office has computers does not make it modern.
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
Re #5. Thanks, I'm glad I wasn't alone in thinking that Lord Jones was way off on one. A pointless, incoherent rant, no doubt intended to annoy anyone with the faintest interest in the world beyond planet cash. To that exent he succeeded, and he also succeeded in making this listener automatically treat all his other utterances as meaningless drivel.
Complain about this comment
Re comment 7 (haufdeed) - oh dear ... if you can't see that traditional 'economics' is dead, and has effectively failed, then I'm not sure where you've been looking ... and there are much more insightful comments on these blogs that point to the clear systematic failures and how all the cosy 'gentlemen's clubs' are not addressing the real issues ... but just looking after themselves instead ...
... which by the way includes the BBC - note we pay their salaries, but we are given no choice, so they should at least honor their responsibility and civic duty to carry out effective journalism and to act on behalf of the British people - nb Paxman went on record a few years ago highlighting the total lack of proper journalism today!
If they know better, and choose not act, then by definition they either operate Poweromics or Ignoromics ... and either way, they are failing in their duty of care to the British people they are meant to serve. Personally I would like to see more journalism and less self-interest/corporate ladder chasing (including in the BBC) - both have had their day and we all have a responsibility (to future generations) to expose what is going on until those in positions of power/responsibility choose to act responsibly (and more people realise and demand them to too).
Complain about this comment
FATWAH FROM AYATOLLAH JADED JEAN:
"It certainly attracts the big names: this week I had Stelios Haji-Ioannou, chairman of Easygroup Ltd and founder of Easyjet, Lord Digby Jones, the former director of the CBI, and Steve Ridgway, the chief executive of Virgin Atlantic Airways."
Big names, powerful men - people who borrowed lots and lots of money.
Didn't we once have a national airline? Didn't we once have state industries which had been invested in/paid for by our parents' and grandparents' hard work which they naively thought would secure their children's future? Little did they know about the American MBA, the new 'neutron' weapon of state destruction.
Along came 'clever' efficiency experts (aka anarchists) who dangled MBA words like efficiency and productivity around the ears of the late 70s generation who didn't have a clue these were just asset-strippers. They didn't realise everyting can be done more efficiently by cutting costs, using computers (big thing chips back in the late 70s, and efficiency was always on the cards for the cognoscenti). Or just working people harder and faster by importing people who'd do it even cheaper. There as all that equity locked up in the state which their parents had funded for them ike some great Trust Fund, a great piggy bank. All it needed were people with AXIS II, Cluster B Personality Disorders to free all that lovely lolly up, and that's exactly what all the sex, drugs, rock n roll and women's lib unleashed - a generation of narcissists just out for themselves.
Is it any wonder that so many people now have the attention spans of goldfish? Female ADHD drops the H and shows up as 'multi-tasking'. Guess what, they're not having babies either. They are in Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc though.
That's efficiency...... and female liberation. UK TFR 1.8, in the rest of Europe it goes as low as 1.2. That's efficiency...
Complain about this comment
"...a "Government Of All the Talents"."
A veritable contradiction!
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
JadedJean # 10
"Didn't we once have a national airline?"
Yes, we did (British Airways Group formed from BOAC and BEA). It was state owned, unprofitable, inefficient and wasteful as all state "enterprises" are. Here are a few more taxpayer financed, loss-making examples of 60s, 70s and 80s state owned monopolies that needed to be broken up and privatised: British Leyland, National Coal Board and the British Steel Corporation.
JJ, your grandparents and parents money was FORCIBLY taken from them and was frittered away by the state!
Complain about this comment
"Digby Jones was an early Goat, coming into the government as minister for trade promotion. He left after less than 18 months, having expressed some dismay about the limitations of working in bureaucracies. He was especially taken aback by not being able to get rid of anybody."
Poor old "Diggers" learned the hard way that unlike the private sector, if government bureaucrats "mess up" and lose a hefty wad of taxpayers' money, they don't get to lose their jobs; in fact, they probably get promoted and a pay rise!
The only thing government is talented at is wasting mind boggling sums of cash confiscated from those work hard in the private sector.
Government talent? Wake up and smell the coffee people!
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
LibertarianKurt (#13) "Yes, we did (British Airways Group formed from BOAC and BEA). It was state owned, unprofitable, inefficient and wasteful as all state "enterprises" are. Here are a few more taxpayer financed, loss-making examples of 60s, 70s and 80s state owned monopolies that needed to be broken up and privatised: British Leyland, National Coal Board and the British Steel Corporation."
It must have occured to you that in a socialist (as opposed to capitalist) economy, the primary goal is to produce goods and services to meet the needs of the people, not to make profit. What free-marketeers do is spin intensional language so that 'unprofitability' and 'inefficiency' become negative terms in the eyes of a young, naive, and ever more unsophisticated electorate, promising to render the means of production and services more profitable and efficient when that was never the primary purpose. In fact, the unprofitability/inefficiency were calculated costs of employment, security and stability.
What you, and other made-over anarchists (aka Liberal-Democrats aka free-marketeers aka Trotskyites aka social democrats aka social fascists) deploy is egregious verbal/political spin. Surley most of the public now knows this?
For those who don't know the the history of this in 1930s USSR just bear in mind that the purge of the COMINTERN and wreckers/saboteurs in the 1930s before WWII was much like that of the (attempted) purges of Militant Tendency (also Trotskyite) by The British Labour Party. There are remarkable parallels, in fact, the original Russian Social Democratic Party (which became teh Bolsheviks) was modelled on the British Labour Party. Stalin and the rest of the party subsequently believed Trotsky to be working in cahoots with Western capitalists to restore capitalism and undermine socialism in the USSR. Social Democrats (like New Labour today) were described as 'Social Fascists' (think political correctness, H&S etc).
That Financial Services now control so much of the UK and US economy through NYC and London and that HMG has effectively no control over this by design, should have been of major concern to the population for years, as they are ultimately going to be paying for it all. By bailing out the banks, they will be funding PFI projects not private investors. Only (e.g. hyperbolic) discounting functions prevent most of the population from seeing this great loop/scam. It's just that dumbing down the population via 'education, education, education' which delays motherhood in the brighter half of the curve (i.e. lowers their TFR relative to females in the lower half of the curve), plushigh rates of low-skilled immigration with high TFRs, makes it harder for the population to see this.
foredeckdave (#12) "So JJ continues his Anonymous Revoltion!"
his? Women are the foot-soldiers/cash-cows and major victims.
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
foredeckdave (#25) The links provided are links to Hansard. 'Purge' just meant ejection from the party, although many in the COMINTERN were executed or imprisoned. The Moscow trials in the late 30s were treason trials. Read Hansard for what was happening on both (Red and White) sides post revolution until the early 20s, and read [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
You may sincerely believe the things which you do (this is the problem with intensions/beliefs), but you are wrong. Psychotics believe in what they believe too. Many humans believe in ghost, angels, Brain-Gym, the mind etc. LibertarianKurt believes he is right too. I'm just telling you how things are. That's behavioural science at work. :-)
As to Quine, empiricism stripped of the two dogmas is science itself. Hence 'Pursuit of Truth', and 'philosophy of science is philosophy enough'.
You are clearly unaware of all of this. Like LibertarianKurt I suspect you won't change, because you don't know how to. You are narcissistic and image is all. It's a Liberal-Democrat's disorder.
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
How will the self publicists Balls or Mandy aproach the Bottom line without giving the humourists a field day.
They could be introduced with such withering invites as "Welcome to the bottom line ,we are so glad to have you on this programme]?"
The Bottom line Venusian is destined to become a lord of the flies trapper
Complain about this comment
hey stephie
why do you think despite a glut of oil the price is still rising? the fabled market forces? or a return to speculation? pushing the price up merely to make money for a few?
in normal market theory a glut would drive prices down. so its not behaving to the model.
is this another example why market forces are not, despite the mantra of the market fundamentalists in the govt and elsewhere, the true arbiter of resources. they are not efficient nor all knowing. Rather it proves once again market forces are ignorant, biased and greedy?
given the govt have based their whole policy agenda on that idea -light regulation, privatisations, pfi- why do they still believe in it despite the evidence. is it a religion?
Complain about this comment
bookhimdano (#39) "it proves once again market forces are ignorant, biased and greedy?"
Which is inevitable given who those 'market-forces' really serve?
"why do they still believe in it despite the evidence. is it a religion?"
It certainly has all the characteristics. ;-(
Complain about this comment
@bookhimdano
Pretty obvious really; demand is stable, supply is falling and they are stockbuilding to replace the stocks which were run down during low prices.
When demand goes up you'll see your "normal market theory" work.
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
39 bookhimdano, It does look as though the liquidity directed towards the banks, reputedly to save the real economy, has been redirected into the counter purpose casino economy to push up comodity prices thus hindering the real economic recovery through higher costs while also maintaining the appearance of value of the footsie 100 in which the mining sector plays a major role.
QE MAY END UP ONLY as preservative for MUMMIFYING A DEAD ECONOMY.
Complain about this comment
Complain about this comment
FrankSz # 42
Frank, do "externalities" have a meaningful role in economics?
Complain about this comment
hodgeey (#41) "When demand goes up you'll see your "normal market theory" work."
The remarkable property of 'Austrian/Chicago School' theories is how asymetrical they are, namely a) they allegedly don't predict events like the Credit Crunch and b) yet they perfectly explain everything after the fact.
This advantage of not being troubled by empirical reality is what Hollywood and the media in general thrives upon. It's also where remuneration is excellent so it's hardly surprising they'll do anything to sustain the status quo. Oppressive statist regimes endeavour to control such activities of course, allegedly to protect their people from 'the work of the devil' - but we know that can't be true and is just paranoid conspiracy theory. Behaviour isn't genetic and inherited at all. Who would want to put about that idea? ;-)
FrankSz (#42) "JJ refuses to discuss the difference between intension and extension, for the obvious reason that it leads to discussions beyond his/her ken."
This is only 'obvious' to you.
What you call discussion, I call education. On this matter you are clearly ineducable. You have a remarkable level of 'entitlement'. ;-)
Complain about this comment
spartacusmartyr (#43) As has been said elsewhere, the banks are a) not charities b) international. They will lend money where they get the best return for their shareholders.
After all, they have been told not to be 'protectionist'. Little do future progeny of the UK tax-payer know this ;-)
Actually, neither do most current tax-payers as the chutzpah factor is way too high for them to take it in.
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
41
not obvious at all to anyone who trades the markets.
people tried to say when oil was 140 that only 10% of it was speculation. after the enforced liquidation and the price reached its 'true level it was 30 doallars.
its being driven by speculation and they depend on general ignorance of the public to get away with it. like they do with retail energy prices. its a racket.
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
bookhimdano # 50
So, what do you suggest; price controls or hang the "greedy" speculators?
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
BORN TO BE SERVED?
superiorsnapshot (#53) Are you perhaps anoher one who feels entitled to be entertained, educated or served by others?
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
50
Oil futures have been in contango for a few years now, but there is a risk of backwardation if demand picks up. There is a lot of hedging going on to protect positions. Here's some reading for you
http://www.theoildrum.com/tag/backwardation
Complain about this comment
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
View these comments in RSS