News & Insights

18 Feb 2007

Sally Clark and the appalling cost of bad science

Last week’s news of the death of Sally Clark, who suffered the most awful injustice a mother could imagine, brought back all the anger. The case illustrated our poor ability to reason using probabilities. Sally’s fate was sealed not by an expert in statistics but by a paediatrician who used statistics outside his abilities and by a judicial system that failed to question the statistics, the reasoning applied to them and the implications for due process.

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
08 Feb 2007

Solving problems in the retail investment market: the FSA consults

In January I went to see the head of the FSA Retail Distribution Review team and some of her colleagues. The FSA set up this team to address the root causes and effects of problems in the distribution of long-term savings products. The fact that the FSA is on this case is good news. But the really good news is that it no longer needs persuading about the root causes. These were stated with surprising bluntness in FSA Chairman Callum McCarthy’s Gleneagles speech.

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
29 Dec 2006

Can holding debt make more sense than holding assets?

For debt, read ‘bonds’, because that is all they are. For assets read ‘equities’, because that is what you own when you hold ‘a piece of the equity’. These two claims on other people are the basic building blocks of asset allocation for long-term savers. Clear distinctions about how each behaves are essential for using them sensibly.

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
25 Nov 2006

The national pensions savings scheme: retail brands lose out – thank goodness

The Pensions Secretary has come out in favour of the Turner Commission’s recommendation to exclude competition between existing insurance company and bank brands for consumers’ semi-compulsory pension contributions when the new ‘national’ pensions scheme is introduced. If you do not believe governments are better organisers than private firms or better allocators of resources than public [...]

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
25 Nov 2006

More useless house price forecasts?

The FT didn’t publish my letter challenging John Kay’s article rubbishing attempts to model and forecast house prices. Last Wednesday it reported on its front page a research report by Morgan Stanley economist Professor David Miles, author of a report on housing finance for the government, headlined “Housing bust ‘likely in the next few years’”.

read more Commentary by Stuart Fowler
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