Turning the corner?

A generally upbeat set of stories in the FT this morning: The Bank of England’s executive director of financial stability has called for risk rules for lending to small businesses to be temporarily relaxed. Although counterintuitive in some ways, it would help to smooth business cycles: encouraging activity in a downturn and reducing the support given …

Crowdfunding shows principles for disruptive business models

Self-publishing used to be called ‘vanity publishing’. But the arrival of the Internet, the ability to sell e-books, and the technology to cost-effectively produce small print-runs, made it increasingly popular. Now an online publisher unbound.co.uk has taken the model one step further. Interested readers can visit their website and review potential books being proposed. If they find …

Unusually warm autumn

An article here describes how the exceptionally warm autumn has led many plants and animals to be seen doing things they wouldn’t normally do till spring — including the arrival of a swallow! This is part of a larger trend of the natural events of the seasons being disturbed, and could be bad news for …