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The article focuses on a research which suggests that the advantages of an expensive education remain robust for most privately schooled children in the Great Britain and the U.S. It informs that 75 percent of private-schoolers in the U.S. go to institutions with religious affiliations which operate on fees that are similar to, or less than, per-pupil funding in government schools.

The article discusses the Australia, United Kingdom, U.S. (AUKUS) Pact that mandates the three countries to collaborate in designing and constructing nuclear-powered submarines that will be armed with conventional weapons for Australia. The project will use the design of the UK's future attack submarine and U.S. technology. Also cited are the challenges in training the officers and crews of a nuclear submarine.

The author explains the reasons why the Australia, United Kingdom, U.S. (AUKUS) Pact, in which the three countries will co-design and fabricate a next-generation submarine, is a feasible model for Western allies to bolster their military defense. Also cited are how the pact bolsters the West's competition with China, and how the deal could trigger an arms race and disrupt regional stability.

The article discusses the economic concerns associated with the wage-price spiral which tend to contribute to inflation in the U.S. and Great Britain. Topics explored include the recorded increase in wage rates in both countries, the decision of the U.S. Federal Reserve System (FRS) to leave interest rates unchanged, and the link between excessive spending wage-price spirals.

The author discusses the global fiscal policy with particular focus on the budget and debt of the British and U.S. governments. Topics explored include the fiscal policy needed to address high inflation and low unemployment rates, the cost of the debt-service of the British government, and the net public debt outlook following the lifting of the U.S. federal debt ceiling.

The article looks at the threats to the state of conservatism in the U.S. and Great Britain. Reactionary nationalism is expected to threaten the status of conservative parties. The difference between conservatism and liberalism according to political psychologists is discussed, as well as the stand of British conservatives on universal suffrage and the preservation of a social order.

The article discusses the unpopularity of inheritance tax across the world including countries like Great Britain, Japan and the U.S.

The article shows the trend of decline in 10-year government bond yields since 1311. It shows the percentage of decline in 10-year government bond yields in the U.S., Great Britain and Germany from 2015-2021. It looks back at the decline in long-term yields relative to interest rates and inflation dating back to the 1300s and identifies key points in history when the path of interest rates changed including the Black Death pandemic and a wave of sovereign debt defaults in the late 1550s.

This article reports on the philanthropic activities around the world. While the rich in America are the most generous, the author also notes that the rate of philanthropy is very high in other parts of the world, notably in Germany, India, Latin America and Asia. The total amount of charitable giving in the United States in 2004 was $249 billion. The article examines various motives for philanthropy, including advantageous tax breaks in the United States and Great Britain.

Focuses on the history and evolution of privatization in Great Britain and the U.S. Details about the privatization of the coal and rail industries in Great Britain by the British Tories; Aspects of privatizing other utilities such as the gas industry, telecommunications and electricity; History of the privatization of social services; Comparison of privatization of the health systems in Britain and the U.S.; Forecast on the level of privatization activity in both countries.

The article presents information related to international finance. The financial systems of the big economies still look very different from one another. History has left its mark. For example, compare the U.S.' banking system, with its thousands of independent banks, to Great Britain's, where a handful of "clearing banks" dominate the market for small deposits or to Japan's, with its hierarchy of different institutions, each with its own traditional line of business. The pre-transformation market for financial services was divided into segments.

The article offers world news briefs. Topics discussed include technology firm Uber' employees are entitled to the minimum wage, holiday pay and a pension in Great Britain; vehicle manufacturer Volkswagen is planning to standardize electrification technology; and economic growth and an increase in inflation in the U.S. as per the U.S. Federal Reserve.

The article discusses growing inequality around the world as an introduction to a special section of the issue devoted to that topic. It is noted that in many countries including the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain, the proportion of nation income received by the wealthiest 1% has risen. The author observes that for much of the 20th century, inequality within nations had narrowed.

The article looks at the merit of policies that allow donations to charity to be tax-exempt. Topics discussed include efforts by politicians in the U.S. and Great Britain to cap the amount of giving that the wealthy can deduct from their taxable income, state and local governments demanding PILOTs (payments in lieu of taxes) from charity groups, and how the wealthiest Americans give proportionally more to the arts and education than religious charities. INSET: MR. GLADSTONE ON CHARITIES.

In this article the author examines personal, corporate and government debt, particularly in the United States and in Great Britain. A number of issues are addressed including the fact that debt cause stagnation, inflation, or default, that corporate growth is best cure for debt, and the degree of personal debt held by the average British and American consumer.

The article examines public debt ratings and government securities yields in developed countries. The global financial crisis and recession have led to a vast increase in the public debts of developed countries. Economic arguments in support of and against the contention that this poses the danger of debt-related crises in those countries are discussed. An increase in interest rates on government securities in the U.S. and Great Britain is forecast.

The article examines how the global financial crisis has affected government policies on finance. The crisis has resulted in increased rejection of the trend towards deregulation of finance begun in the U.S. and Great Britain. The role of securitization of loans such as mortgage loans in the crisis is discussed.

This article discusses challenges associated with the management of defined benefit pension funds in Great Britain and the U.S. Irregularities in public sector pension fund accounting including different discount rates used to estimate future liabilities and inaccurate projections of the longevity of beneficiaries are considered. The possible savings of switching government employees from a defined benefit pension plan to defined contribution plans are considered.

This article reports on how the global financial crisis is affecting education in the U.S. and Great Britain. Despite the recession, the article notes that the number of applications for private schools has increased, as have tuition costs and requests for financial aid. The article also discusses tuition freezes, funding for public schools, and privilege related to schooling.

This article reports on Great Britain's armed forces and their lack of support, funding, and conviction. The article describes Great Britain's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, noting changes in both available resources and the perception of the troops between 2003 and 2009. The article also discusses relations between the British armed forces and the U.S. military and perceptions of both groups by soldiers and civilians. Information is also provided on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

The article discusses the historic commonality of transatlantic Anglo-Saxon values, and the extent to which the views of people in Great Britain and the U.S. have diverged. Public opinion research data are examined on British and American attitudes regarding religion, social values, and the role of government.

The article examines the growing popularity of economic stimulus legislation and looser fiscal policies in countries affected by the overall slowdown of economic growth in 2007. Such legislation has been enacted or proposed in developed countries including the U.S., Great Britain, and Spain. While most such countries have run budget surpluses in the 2000s, the U.S. and Great Britain are notable exceptions.

The article discusses how the elements of securitization have become vulnerable in the international market. Securitization is the process by which various financial assets are transformed into securities that are marketable. In Great Britain, banks that used this system grew very quickly, until investors pulled their money out as a result of the mortgage crashes that took place in the U.S. during 2007.

The article discusses the common roots of British and American securities regulations and the divergence of those systems. The American Securities and Exchange Commission is contrasted with the British Financial Services Authority. The expanding complexity and international interconnections of financial markets and the difficulties these pose for national regulators are also discussed.

The article reports that Tesco, Britain's largest supermarket group, will expand its business into the U.S., beginning with highly secretive grocery stores in Phoenix, Arizona. Tesco is the third largest supermarket in the world, but slowing sales in Britain have forced the company to consider overseas projects. The article states that Tesco has performed very large amounts of research into the way Americans eat and cook, and hopes to pair the convenience of small stores with quality foods.

This article reports on actuaries and their role in the crisis that has enveloped corporate pensions in Great Britain and the U.S. As a profession, actuaries stand accused of negligence on a grand scale. This is truest in Britain, which is where the pensions crisis is most acute, and is also where actuaries are laying a path for their colleagues in America and continental Europe on how to put their mistakes right.

This article profiles the anarchist movement of the late 19th century and comments on its similarities to jihadism in the 21st century. Bombs, beards and backpacks: these are the distinguishing marks, at least in the popular imagination, of the terror-mongers who either incite or carry out the explosions that periodically rock the cities of the western world. A century or so ago it was not so different: bombs, beards and fizzing fuses. The worries generated by the two waves of terror, the responses to them and some of their other characteristics are also similar. The spasm of anarchist violence that was at its most convulsive in the 1880s and 1890s was felt, if indirectly, in every continent. It claimed hundreds of lives, including those of several heads of government, aroused widespread fear and prompted quantities of new laws and restrictions. But it passed. Jihadism is certainly not a lineal descendant of anarchism: far from it. Even so, the parallels between the anarchist bombings of the 19th century and the Islamist ones of today may be instructive.

The article reports on non-food genetic modification. GM cotton is widely grown. And you may have been treated with a drug produced with the use of GM. Wide public support has enabled anti-GM zealots to win battles on the food front in Europe and elsewhere; and fear of losing trade deters GM in other countries that grow and export the stuff, even if they would readily eat it themselves. Yet, overall, the enemies of GM are losing the war. Monsanto, an American agri-business that is the main commercial promoter of the technique decided not to bring its GM wheat variety to market, not even in the largely GM-tolerant United States. And a huge new use for GM crops is already under way. Not that the way ahead is clear. The spread even of non-food GM will be affected by the vagaries of public perception. The big, publicly visible boom in non-food GM, however, is likelier to come in chemicals, plastics, fibres and fuel. Instead of petroleum, these will be derived from maize, soya or other crops--sugar beet in Europe, say. In time, plants may even be modified to make polymers themselves; it was done experimentally, but then dropped, by Britain's ICI and later Monsanto in the 1990s. Metabolix, a research company in Massachusetts, is now getting bacteria to grow finished plastics that are biodegradable.

The article argues that the committees of inquiry into U.S. and British intelligence failures may have left the West less secure as of July 2004. When commissions of inquiry investigate intelligence failures of extraordinary magnitude, their conclusions inevitably have an overwhelming influence on the conduct of intelligence chiefs and their political masters for generations to come. Whatever the practical steps taken by the powers-that-be to implement this or that recommendation of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the September 11th commission, and the British committee headed by Lord Butler, the language and rhetoric of these documents are destined to have an enormous impact on the manner in which world leaders, both in intelligence and in politics, will perform in times of crisis and war. There is an inherent understanding in the findings that the shortage of information on the threats--from Islamic terrorism and from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction--was at the root of the intelligence breakdown on these two fronts. There is the belief that the more the system is streamlined, the greater the possibility that the final product will be accurate and properly exploited. Now there is a recommendation to appoint an intelligence director in the United States. In my opinion no greater mistake could be made so far as the intelligence community is concerned.

The article focuses on the delivery of medical care. One manifest sign of poor quality is the number of people who die because of medical errors. The Institute of Medicine estimated that such errors in American hospitals were responsible for at least 44,000 deaths a year, and perhaps more than twice that. Medication errors alone, such as incorrect dosages, accounted for 7,000 deaths. According to the institute, health care was "a decade or more behind other high-risk industries in its attention to ensuring basic safety". Not only can medical errors result in human tragedies, they also waste money because of compensation claims and the additional spending needed to try to put things right. Recent studies in Canada and Denmark have documented a high incidence of medical errors in hospitals. Thomas Schioler of the Danish National Board of Health says that in many countries a large number of patients are injured because of medical treatment and not because of their underlying disease. Overuse of medical procedures is also common. Yet another form of waste is under-use of appropriate medical care. A report from the National Committee for Quality Assurance, an independent watchdog of American health care, estimated in 2003 that over 57,000 American deaths a year could be attributed to a failure to deliver best-practice care. Reviewing a subsequent comparison of the quality of care in five countries--Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and America--Elizabeth McGlynn, who led the RAND study, recently wrote in Health Affairs that other countries were doing no better than America.

The article discusses financing of health care. Spending on Britain's NHS is scheduled to rise by over 7% a year in real terms until 2007-08. By then, total health expenditure in Britain will have vaulted to 9.4% of GDP, compared with 6.9% in 1998, the year before the spending spree started. As a general rule, medical spending in rich countries tends to rise faster than national output. Over the longer term, as Paul Ginsburg of the Centre for Studying Health System Change in Washington, DC, points out, the increase in health-care spending per person in other industrialised countries has been remarkably similar to America's.Since 1970, the average real growth in rich countries outside America has been 4.0% a year, compared with 4.4% in America. This suggests a common cause. A survey conducted by Victor Fuchs of Stanford University in 1995 showed that most health economists point the finger at advances in medical technology. Scientific research establishes the basis for expensive new medical procedures, products and drugs. The Tufts Centre for the Study of Drug Development calculates that, taking into account failed products, it now costs $900m to develop a new prescription drug. Over time, the cost of medical technologies declines, especially when proper account is taken of quality improvements. Expensive drugs protected by patent are replaced by cheap generics. Surgical procedures and medical devices fall in price, so the cost per patient drops. But this is more than offset by the rise in the demand for such treatments, which pushes up expenditure per person. In addition, the health-care sector is labour-intensive, so that the more it does, the more people it needs, many of whom are highly paid. Hospitals blame cost pressures from labour shortages and new regulatory requirements; others say it reflects their market power, which has been aided by a wave of mergers.

The article examines the intelligence failures in the governments of the United States and Great Britain that fueled the justification for war with Iraq in 2003. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a report released two days earlier, America invaded Iraq on the strength of intelligence that was out-of-date, inaccurate, badly analysed and, in short, did not justify the nub of U.S. president George W. Bush's case for war. America did not, as Mr. Bush had claimed, have conclusive evidence that Iraq had retained and replenished its chemical and biological weapons, or that it was reactivating its nuclear programme. Mr. Blair persuaded the British parliament to vote for war on the basis of Iraq's weapons--which the prime minister termed a" serious and current" threat--and the connected argument that Saddam had consistently breached United Nations resolutions.On July 14th, a British inquiry into intelligence on Iraq's putative weapons of mass destruction (WMD), headed by Lord Butler, a former top civil servant, delivered a broadly similar verdict to the Senate committee's, but in a kindlier tone. Where the Senate report in the U.S. barely contained their dismay at the CIA's ineptitude, his lordship's criticism was more of a finger-wagging, with much talk of collective responsibility.

This article focuses on the continued hope for establishing a functional democracy in Iraq through the understanding of the violent insurgency and the clarification of political priorities. If Iraq could somehow be freed from violence, the programme of political, social and economic development set up by the coalition during the occupation would represent real progress. For the time being, however, the violence is all too present and is immensely damaging. Its nature, and the motives behind it, need to be examined carefully to understand what has been taken on in Iraq. The context needs to be set out with clarity. And the prognosis for the next year has to take account of what the Iraqis themselves wish to and can achieve. As Britain's representative at the United Nations, I was nonetheless clear in my own mind that Iraq had offended so grossly against the requirements of the UN and international law, and had told so many lies about weapons of mass destruction, that it had laid itself open to the use of force to ensure compliance with UN resolutions. My primary aim, agreed with my bosses in London, was to help the Americans develop a political process which would end the occupation as soon as sensibly possible and leave Iraq stable enough to sustain its own experiment of government with the consent of the people. Whether or not the UN gears itself up to play a full role in the politics and social reconstruction of Iraq--and Kofi Annan must make a huge decision here about the UN's capacity to take on the hardest tasks--the iron framework for Iraq's future has to be wrought by the powers who volunteered for this job.

The article discusses the challenges facing London law firms seeking to merge with New York firms. "We're leading the way. Others will have to follow," said the senior partner of Clifford Chance four years ago when the London lawyers merged with New York's Rogers & Wells and Germany's Pünder, Volhard, Weber & Axster. At the time, the three formed the world's biggest and most international law firm. But nobody did, in fact, follow their pioneering route, at least not on anything like the same scale. The only proximate followers were the big accounting firms which had ambitions to build legal practices as global as their accounting businesses. Is it time then to abandon the idea of assembling a truly international law firm? Not all firms have abandoned the attempt to become big and global. Multinational clients, they say, are clamouring for firms with a global reach. Cross-border deals are increasing, in Europe in particular where ten new countries are about to join the European Union. What's more, after the recent spate of corporate scandals, a slew of new rules on corporate governance calls for greater transnational legal expertise. The drive for globalisation of the profession has been stymied by the different nature of the business in its two biggest markets-London and New York. Each city has a small group of highly reputable firms whose list of blue-chip clients marks them out as special. New York firms are markedly more profitable than their London counterparts. One big problem is that none of the top New York firms is interested in a merger.

The debate over "offshoring" has been brewing since a study by Forrester, a research group, in 2002 claimed that 3.3m white-collar American jobs (500,000 of them in IT) would shift offshore to countries such as India by 2015. Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley, talks about a "new and powerful global labour arbitrage" that has led to an accelerating transfer of high-wage jobs to India and elsewhere. He reckons this is adding to the bias towards jobless recoveries in western economies. Multinationals may in future do original R&D in low-cost places, but for the moment most of the jobs on the move are the paper-based back-office ones that can be digitalised and telecommunicated anywhere around the world, plus more routine telephone inquiries that are increasingly being bundled together into call centres. The offshoring business remains predominantly English-speaking. It is dominated by American and British companies outsourcing their internal operations to third parties in places such as Ireland, Canada and South Africa, but most of all in India. The main advantage of shifting business operations to India and similar low-cost countries comes from a combination of lower wages and the improvement in the quality and price of international telecommunications. But the benefits of offshoring are not confined to lower costs. For one thing, offshoring allows companies to work round-the-clock shifts, ferrying data back and forth from one place to another as the sun sets. For another, it allows them to rethink the way they solve IT problems.

Some British commentators allege that companies have taken over the role of government, creating a "Captive State" (in the title of a book by George Monbiot, a Guardian journalist) or have made a "Silent Takeover" of sovereignty (a book by Noreena Hertz, a Cambridge academic). Others simply think the free-market era was a "False Dawn" and is over (John Gray, of the London School of Economics). Americans have tended to focus on the role of lobbyists and political corruption ("Pigs at the Trough", by Arianna Huffington, cited earlier; "Government's End", by Jonathan Rauch, a columnist for the National Journal and formerly a writer for The Economist), or on the relationship between "Wealth and Democracy" (Kevin Phillips, a distinguished political writer). Is there any truth to all this? One thing these critiques are not compatible with is the common notion that the nation state is dead, its powers handed over to markets by "fundamentalists" (ie, the deregulation and privatization led by former President Ronald Reagan in America and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain in the 1980s), or usurped by globalization or supranational institutions (the European Union, the World Trade Organization, etc). For if the state had few powers left, it would not be worth capturing, bribing or otherwise suborning. But it has, and it is. Corruption, by firms and individuals seeking to exploit governments' vast powers, is indeed a big problem for democracies all over the world. Yet it is not the whole problem. Governments remain far too keen to do businessmen's bidding even when no money is offered. Why, for example, have share options not been treated as a cost in corporate accounts, or taxed equally with other personal income? Corruption, in other words. Yet this cannot be the whole answer, for options have been given special treatment elsewhere, too: Britain's Labour government maintained tax concessions for them without donations in return.

Does the commercial-property cycle dance to the same beat as the housing market? Just as households have come to see their home as their best investment, investors have also changed their view of commercial real estate. Prices of commercial property have always been more volatile than those of housing, partly because the supply lags are longer. Booms and busts in commercial property caused widespread banking problems in the early 1990s, when property prices fell by 50% in America and Britain and by 70-80% in Japan and Sweden. Figures published by Reis, a property-research firm based in New York, show that the volume of occupied office space in America has already fallen for two consecutive years and declined again in the first quarter of this year. When inflation was high, bond yields were higher than property yields. But rents generally rise in line with inflation, so the percentage yield (income divided by price) is steady, whereas bonds pay a fixed income, so if inflation falls, and hence bond prices rise, the percentage yield falls.

The rapid house-price inflation in many countries over the past few years is clearly unsustainable. But will house prices just flatten off or will they slump? Alan Greenspan, who criticized the stock market's's "irrational exuberance" long before that particular bubble was fully inflated, is more sanguine about American house prices. The argument that lower interest rates make homes cheaper to buy is badly flawed, because it ignores inflation. If interest rates are low only because inflation is low, then although initial mortgage payments are smaller, the real burden of mortgage debt will be eroded more slowly over time, and payments will remain high in relation to income for much longer. The ratio of average house prices to average incomes, which tracks the long-term affordability of homes, is currently flashing red in America, Britain, Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain. Mr Greenspan insists there is no "national" housing bubble in America, and indeed houses across the country are on average less overvalued than elsewhere. But if a bubble were to burst in several cities simultaneously, that would have big national consequences. House prices in America and other economies are unlikely to fall as precipitously as share prices have done over the past three years, but even a much smaller drop could do more serious economic harm.

Discusses the failure of the United States to locate Iraqi stores of weapons of mass destruction, the existence of which was used to justify the Iraq War. Had Iraqi President Saddam Hussein used his alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) during the U.S.-led war that dislodged him, the doubts about his illegal arsenal would have evaporated. Yet despite all the talk of "red lines" around Baghdad, the sweaty protective suits in which U.S. and British troops laboured were never put to the test. The ongoing elusiveness of the fabled "smoking gun" has led even those who supported the war to ask whether the WMD that in theory provoked it ever really existed--and whether the "proof" adduced by those who waged it was shoddy, or worse. Conspiracy theorists should remember that much of the evidence against Hussein came not from the U.S.and British governments or their spies, but from two unimpeachable sources, the United Nations weapons inspectors, and Hussein himself. There are plausible explanations for why Hussein did not use his WMD during the war: political considerations, the pace of the U.S. advance, and so on. But it would be very odd if he hadn't at least made some of them ready, assuming he had any. There are various possible explanations for their invisibility. One is that the U.S.-led teams that have been nosing around Iraq haven't done a very good job, perhaps because they lack the expertise of the specialists led by chief inspector Hans Blix. The most frequently cited argument is that the job requires more time. As the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency once warned might happen if Iraq were attacked, some may even have fallen into the hands of terrorists. The bungled hunt for Iraq's WMD could yet turn out to be worse than an embarrassment.

Policymakers in America and Britain used to be rather smug about their pension systems. They had shifted much of the burden of providing for people's retirement off the state and on to the private sector. In America, many companies now run large corporate-pension deficits (the amount by which the value of the schemes' assets falls short of the current value of the pensions they are pledged to pay in the future). In both Britain and the U.S., there has been growing alarm about the state of companies' pension funds. According to estimates by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), a quasi-governmental agency that insures the basic benefits of 44 million Americans with pensions provided by about 32,500 private defined-benefit plans, corporate-pension deficits have swollen to some $300 billion. In Britain, corporate pension schemes are also in trouble.

The article discusses the challenge to create a British-American trade deal under U.S. President Donald Trump. It says that despite the favor shown by Trump and his officials such as treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and Representative George Holding on British trade deals, the U.S. Congress still struggles to pass trade deals. It mentions that some in British government is likely to consider limited agreement to liberalise economic sectors, wherein U.S. and Great Britain have similar views.

Describes the business operations and marketing strategies used by the six major sound recording companies worldwide. Overview of the history of the music industry; Popularity of specific musicians; Strategies by music producers; Factors contributing to the popularity of musicians and profitability of music recording companies; Estimation of music sales; Comparison of the music industry in Great Britain and the U.S.; Emergence of music videos; Other trends and developments in music and the industry.

Focuses on trends and developments in the music business in Great Britain and the U.S. Emergence of various type of music; Evolution of popular music; Profile on several musicians; Estimation of the number of hours spent by individuals on recorded music as compared to television, radio, newspapers and other forms of media; Implications of digitalization and other technological innovations for the industry; Overview of sales of cassettes, compact discs and recorded music; Effects of existing economic conditions such as inflation; Overview of profit margins and trends in the industry.

Explores various approaches for energy conservation in the U.S. and Great Britain. Ratio of energy demand to gross national product; Sources of energy savings; Investment in more energy-efficient ways of doing things; Industries' adoption of most efficient technologies in the market.

The article highlights the indications and implications of a representative form of government citing the benefits of direct democracy. Political trends worldwide indicate economic and political difficulties experienced by countries that exercise representative government including Great Britain and the United States. Evidently, citizens in these countries tend to distrust their elected politicians which might pave the way for direct democracy.

Discusses possible reasons behind income inequalities between rich and poor people in America and Britain. Concern about the social consequences of this change; Views of Britain's Commission for Social Justice about poverty and wealth; Free market economic policies.

Presents an examination of crime statistics in the United States and Great Britain. Comparison of murder rates since 1900; Statistics of police on violent crimes that differ from national public survey results; Effect of income level on crime rates; Information on the grant of greater powers to police over criminals released from jail.

The article presents information related to international finance. Twenty years from now economists will think of the 1980s not as the decade of the international debt crisis, nor of the dollar's boom and bust, still less of monetarism. Financial change in Great Britain, the U.S. and Japan in the 1980s was driven by the same forces, innovation, technology and deregulation. Those causes were at work everywhere. At the level of national policy-making, they have already created difficulties, and there may well be more and worse troubles to come. Figures for gross capital flows are even dodgier than their net counterparts. A true measure of international finance would have to start with bank lending-in foreign currency to foreign residents, in domestic currency to foreign residents, and in foreign currency to home residents.

The article focuses on tontines insurance products. European kings use tontines, which Italian banker Lorenzo de Tonti devised in the 17th century, to raise funds for wars or to pay off debts. Tontines were banned in New York and in Great Britain under the Life Assurance Act of 1774. These insurance products are less costly than annuities because the risks are not taken onto the balance-sheet of an insurer.