sutton038

Globalisation can lead to surreal situations. For example, several weeks ago I got a call from a Kenyan guy called Karim Ajania , who's based in San Francisco, and who runs a website for a Mozambican forestry project called Mezimbite. You'd think the website would be focused on, well, Mozambican forestry, but it features contributions on a variety of topics from some pre-eminent global economists, including Sir Partha Dasgupta and Oxford's Paul Collier . Karim told me that h e'd managed to get respected Harvard professor  and former economic advisor to Bill Clinton,  Jeff Frankel , to write him a short blog on commodity speculation. Karim wanted me to write a reply. Karim had seen a  previous article  I'd written on food speculation , where I'd suggested that excessive involvement of financial players in agricultural futures markets could distort prices of real food, potentially leading to negative impacts on the welfare of the world's most...

An hour or so out of London, in the commuter belt, is a place called Cheshunt. It is home to the world’s crappest corporate headquarters. They belong to Tesco and they're situated in a light industrial zone, next door to Monster Gym, the first American style warehouse gym in the UK ( satellite image here and google street view here ) TESCO: A RIGHT SHITHOLE This photo was taken in 2009, and at the time I was trying to sell Tesco esoteric financial derivatives. I sat in a room with someone from the treasury and suggested she should consider entering into a large transaction which, at the time, I thought to be in both our interests. She didn’t dig the idea, but appreciated the attempt. Innovation, she said, was what Tesco was all about. Looking back, I feel privileged to have walked the crap linoleum floor of the world’s crappest corporate headquarters, to have seen the crap canteen plonked in the entrance lobby, and the crap cramped desks of the employees that run one of the world’...