If you want to understand what makes David Cameron tick, a good place to start is by looking at his career at Carlton Communications. Cameron spent seven years at the media company as head of corporate affairs. He was a PR man for far longer than he's been an MP and for longer than he spent as a political researcher.

If any adult experience has shaped him, it must be [...]

Gordon Brown didn't get quite the reaction he'd hoped for when he scrapped plans to force listed companies to publish operating and financial reviews (OFRs). The U-turn was billed as a pro-business move, cutting the burden on companies, slashing red tape, and so on. Sure enough, the Confederation of British Industry dutifully applauded the Chancellor's decision, which was deftly leaked to coincide with its annual conference. But business is not [...]

Illegal anti-competitive behaviour is not restricted to geezers in smoke-filled rooms plotting to fleece their customers over the price of cement. It is sometimes perpetrated by the nicest people. Revelations of how the bursars of Britain's top public schools conspired against fee-paying parents make riveting reading.

Information on raising fees was shared annually between 51 schools, orchestrated by Sevenoaks School in Kent. E-mails between the bursars, as revealed in the [...]

Chewing the fat with one of the City's top fund managers, I heard an expression that goes to the heart of why capitalism works so maddeningly imperfectly. We were discussing the proposed £7bn merger between Boots and a rival chemist chain, Alliance UniChem. Much is at stake. If the deal works, tens of thousands of jobs will be secured. The high street will have a new, beefed-up force to fight [...]

No one celebrates the beneficence of market forces more heartily than those in the financial services industry. Bankers, insurers and investment professionals wax happily about the near-mystical way that individual choices, though selfish in themselves, lead collectively to the best of all possible worlds.

Yet it is in the financial services industry, above all other sectors of the economy, where Adam Smith's "invisible hand" goes wonky. Companies that treat their [...]

When Guinness took over the Scotch whisky producer Distillers 19 years ago, it promised to relocate its headquarters to Edinburgh to mollify the bruised Scots, and then promptly reneged on its pledge. The betrayal was quickly forgotten amid the shock of the infamous share support scandal that blew up soon after.

I was reminded of the saga as Boots - for decades the jewel in the crown of the Nottingham [...]

I nearly dropped my loofah the other morning when Gordon Brown told John Humphrys that Britain had been in a "house-price bubble" for the past two years. Surely, this was a slip of the tongue? The Chancellor was being grilled by the Today programme presenter, and it would have been easy to overstate the government view of the property market in the heat of the moment.

But no: speaking to [...]

We are all mini-capitalists now. Well, those of us outside the public sector. The slow death of the final-salary pension fund is imperceptibly, but profoundly, changing the economic landscape. Within a generation, in the private sector, the responsibility for ensuring a minimum of financial security in old age will have shifted largely from employer to employee.

Apart from the state pension, workers in the private sector will enjoy no guarantees [...]

''To Skype" hasn't yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Unlike Hoovering and Googling, the public haven't yet taken Skyping to their bosom. Most probably don't yet know what it means.

But eBay, the popular online auction house, is convinced they soon will and that the trademark could one day achieve the ultimate accolade, becoming a verb. eBay has just paid £1.4bn for Skype, a technology business that enables [...]

A tiny terraced house in Leeds made a piece of financial history the other day. With No 5, Back Clarence Road, Horsforth, the purest form of modern-day screen-based capitalism tapped into the British fetish for ownership of bricks and mortar.

For petty cash, anyone can log on to the internet and buy a share in No 5. At the last count the shares were trading at £1 each, which buys [...]