Irwin Stelzer

Picking losers

By bashing bankers and building trains, the government is trying to remould the economy. It will never work

issue 16 October 2010

So we are to have a new industrial policy, this one courtesy of the coalition government and, more specifically, George Osborne and Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Transport Secretary. Both are economically literate, professing faith in markets as allocators of resources; but they have found the lure of shaping the economy in their image irresistible.

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