Jeremy Hunt’s package of reforms to financial services regulation has been trailed as a 21st Century ‘Big Bang’. For younger readers, the last one was in 1985, when both Thatcher’s UK and Reagan’s America effectively let the banks have free rein to lend, invest and run the financial markets. A boom or two followed and it took 15 years for the chickens to come home to roost when, in 2008, those uncontrolled banks started to go bust, everything crashed and governments suddenly realised they needed regulating after all. So here we go again, about to ‘unlock the potential of Brexit’, to bring on, they hope, another blood-rush of lending and investing which will, I fear, have the same, inevitable results. But, for this government, on someone else’s watch. Cynical? Moi? Sorry, but I really have seen it all before.
“Advice firm Almond Financial moves to four-day working week”
The Four Day Week was much discussed and trailed post-COVID, when remote-working looked likely to end strap-hanging commutes for good and laptops on the kitchen table were to become the ’new norm’.