 OK, well, it is quarter past five. And I realize I'm the only thing standing between you and the free drink reception at 6 o'clock. So I think we should make a start. My name's Jonathan Mickey for those who I haven't met before. And I'm the director of this department for continuing education, also president of one of the university's colleges, Gallaud College. I might mention in a minute. So firstly, I'd like to welcome everybody here, whether you're one of our existing students or you're here for the first time or indeed one of our loyal students who have been with us for a long time. I'd like to welcome everybody here. The University of Oxford is probably one of the world's finest universities. And this department for continuing education is definitely the university's finest department. So you're very welcome here. I'm going to say something about the 2008 credit crunch, the recession, the current economic climate, what the government's doing about it, and then something called the Commission on Ownership on which I served, which was trying to look longer term at what could be done to help the British economy. And then finally, what could be done in the immediate term. Quite a bit of what I'm going to cover is covered in one way or another by various of our courses. I'll try and mention those as I go through. But there's a lot that isn't, but could be if there was a demand from people like you to do the courses. Some of you were in the session we had earlier at midday by my colleague Dr. Martin Ruse, a new university lecturer in political economy who we've just hired precisely to put on more courses and economics, so it's something we intend to do, but we do need to know what you want, what subjects you want, whether you want weekly class programs, summer schools, day and weekend programs, online courses, degree programs, whatever. First I'll introduce myself. Slightly ashamed to say I didn't go to Kellogg College when I came here in the 1970s. In my defense, firstly, Kellogg College is for graduates only when I came as an undergraduate, and also when I came in 1976, Kellogg College hadn't even been thought of, let alone established. And the reason was when I came in the 1970s in the University of Oxford, you weren't allowed to work during term time if you were a student. I'm at, I'd also surprise, surprise as Americans, obviously they're used to the idea that you work as a college student. I also surprise people who stop and think but how could you have a business school if you don't have an executive MBA where the high flying executives just come for a short weekend. Well the answer was simple. University of Oxford didn't allow a business school. It didn't regard management and business as a legitimate academic subject in those days. It only established it in the 1990s. Now realize, given what's happened since 2008, some people might think, well, maybe Oxford was right there on. Maybe a business schools haven't done much good for the state of the world economy. But in any case, it was only in 1990 that the university agreed for post-graduates only that you could work during term time and study for a post-graduates degree, a doctorate or a master's program part time. And that's why Kellogg College was set up. So I did politics, philosophy and economics, I had a D-Phil, a college lecturer in economics before going and doing various economic policy jobs, non-academic jobs. Ended up in Brussels working as an expert. That was the job description of my evaluation for the European Commission. As you'll probably guess from later slides, I wasn't responsible for designing the euro. Then when I did become an academic, I actually went to Cambridge. I used to have to keep that quiet around here. Yeah, I used to go heckled like that. But you can now announce in-flight company given that I current Vice Chancellor Professor Andrew Hamilton was at Cambridge. That's where he did his PhD before going to Yale and back to Oxford. I met Birkbeck College, head of the School of Management, which is sort of the equivalent of this department, was formed by George Birkbeck to spread the blessings of knowledge to the working people of London for part time, people who were working and studying part time. Birmingham, where I was Dean of the Business School, so that's probably what I just said about business schools, and then came back here almost five years ago to be Professor of Innovation and Knowledge Exchange at Oxford, director of this department and president of Kellogg. And at Kellogg, I direct a center called the Oxford Center for Mutual and Employee-Owned Business. It's looking at companies like John Lewis owned by their employees or the Co-op Bank and the cooperative shops owned by their customers. Because I mentioned those alternative corporate forms, companies, organizations owned not by external shareholders but by customers and employees. And I say that because I'm going to comment on that later. I actually think one of the peculiarities of the British economy is the relatively weak mutual employee-owned sector. Most other countries, including across Europe, and the United States have a stronger mutual employee-owned sector and I think that's better for the resilience of the economy. So I thought I should declare that up front. We've produced various publications including this one on the health service and part of the reason I'm putting out these up, these are all downloadable free of charge from the Kellogg College website as a PDF. If you have any difficulty, let me know where I live and I'll send you hard copies but they're all available on the web to read and downloadable. So the credit crunch in 2008. I would argue the broad causes with that whole 30 years from the early 80s of privatization, deregulation, demutialization in Britain where customer-owned mutual-building societies were demutialized and turned into private shareholder-owned banks to speculate along with the rest of them. Promoting the greed is good corporate culture well depicted in that film Wall Street of shareholder value, the idea that the purpose of a company should be to maximize the price of shares and dividends paid to the shareholders rather than what you produce, the purpose of the company, serving the customers and so on. That whole 30 years of privatization, deregulation, there's lots of seats by the way, it did come to the front. That whole 30 years was well described by the economist sadly died a few years ago, but who taught me in the 1970s here in Oxford, Andrew Glenn, who just before he died and just before the 2008 credit crunch when everything seemed to be going wonderfully for the global economy, he wrote a book called Capitalism Unleashed by which he meant that during the 1950s, 60s, 70s, the global capitalist system was very heavily regulated internationally. You couldn't just move money around internationally and in most domestic countries, a lot of public ownership, public regulation and it was really only from the 1980s onwards that all those regulations were scrapped. Interesting, a lot of those regulations were introduced because in the 1930s with the global economic slump and Cain's writing that that wasn't a surprise to him, markets didn't operate automatically to return economies to full employment. You had to intervene, regulate to stop excessive speculation and so on. Most countries follow his advice, put in the place that those sort of regulations and it was only after 30 years of relative economic prosperity for the world economy during the 1950s, 60s, 70s that those who saw that they could profit from having a more free market environment managed to successfully lobby to get those sort of regulations repealed because memories had sort of faded by why they were introduced in the first place and the dangers of having unleashing capitalism as Andrew Glenn very presciently called his book Forecasting Really What Happened Since. I think that crunch was nicely epitomized by Northern Rock which had been a very successful customer owned mutual building society which had then been demutalized, turned into a private bank, had speculated along with the other banks and gone bankrupt. That one was particularly well known because for those of you who did economics in school one of the first things you're taught is obviously it's very difficult for economies to develop originally at the time of the industrial revolution because the idea that there would be this company which would take in your money and whenever you came to get it back they would give it back to you. Obviously raise some suspicions at first and people were nervous and when banks first started being fined and as soon as it was a bad rumor of course everyone would want their money and there'd be a bank run and the banks would collapse. So all governments had to introduce regulation to assure customers that banks would be forced to keep a reasonable amount of money back so that it would be able to give you your money back if and when you wanted it. So we were all taught that bank runs had been abolished that problem had been solved which indeed they had until Northern Rock came along speculated, gambled, it all went wrong and the pictures were shown all around the world of the people up in Newcastle queuing all night to get their money out and sure enough when they opened the next morning they didn't have enough money to pay them back and the company collapsed and we the taxpayers put hundreds of millions of pounds in to bail them out. And at 2008 credit crunch actually the recession and the global recession in 2009 was actually the first global recession since the 1930s. It was the first time since the 1930s that the level of national income production wealth of the entire globe actually fell during that year. That had never happened since the 1930s. So in 2009, despite the fact that China, India, other countries, Brazil continue to grow strongly global national income fell. And the recession that kicked off ordinarily obviously countries recover from recession in Britain, other countries recover from the recession in the 1930s, partly with Keynes as a helpful advice. We recovered from the very steep recession in 1979 in 18 usually within two or three years. I mean this was obviously four years ago the 2008 credit crunch and the national income in Britain, national output, GMP, however you measure it is still lower today than it was four or five years ago before the recession which is pretty well unprecedented. Now all this is discussed in detail in a number of podcasts which are downloadable free of charge done by me and a colleague Dr. Linda Yu who's at Teddy Hall here, an economist. And as I say these are downloadable free of charge from that website itunes.oxacuk. Itunes is a global operation where all the leading universities participate putting up lectures which are downloadable and Oxford's been particularly good at encouraging academics to put their material on there and has regularly been number one in the global charts. And please say the reason Oxford's done better than Harvard or almost any other universities is thanks to this department the best, the most popular lectures have been from academics in this department. Our philosopher particularly has been number one repeatedly in those global charts which is slightly annoying to me because the highest any of these got to his number two globally although in one of these was number two globally it was keeping Barack Obama's original inaugural lecture speech into a third place so that was that. I thought that was quite impressive. We also do online courses, 10 week online courses which people do have to pay for they're tutor, although they're online they're kept to small numbers, a maximum of 30 or so people so the tutor gets to know each student during the 10 weeks and the students get to know each other but these materials are free of charge. The two of the courses we do already in economics is one written by Linda Yu on New Economic Powers of China in the other the role that those economies are playing and one on globalization written by myself so that I could use my textbook as the course book. A second edition came out last year but I gave a lecture the other day to a high level visiting Chinese delegation and they said at the end, yeah that's very interesting and we know the economy's in trouble and so on but why are you saying it beforehand? So I've got a quote here from a book of mine in 1999 where I did indeed say that the fact that economy is becoming increasingly internationalized does not take the form that this process is taking. The free market laser fair agenda is one being pursued by those who benefit from such deregulated winner take all environment. It's not the only choice and for the majority of the world's population it's an inappropriate one. So I mean I have been, I can all along as have a large number of other economists including my colleague Martin Ruiz some of you've heard earlier today. There is not a question of being pro-anti-globalization as the form that this globalization has taken which has been skewed to make the rich and powerful and wealthy even richer and wealthier both in the country and globally within countries and across countries. Onto the Euro crisis then and the Omni shambles. First a little competition. Who knows why Omni shambles is particularly in the news today? What do you mean, a dictionary? Can someone do that? Oxford Day, yeah, exactly. You've got a bunch of years to go. No, but yeah, but... That's right, the word begins. That's right, yeah, yeah. But I think it's every year there's this news story about which was Oxford University Press has decided to include in Oxford English Dictionary and Omni shambles as the most favored one of the batch they've agreed to introduce this year. And so for those who don't know, I said Oxford is one of the best universities at Oxford University Press is by far the most successful university press in the world. And my chancellor likes to explain that it's actually more successful by any measure than all the American university presses and Cambridge University Press put together, which is very good news for us because the surpluses, I can't say profits, because it's part of the university which is a registered charity, so we can't make a profit, but the surpluses all go to fund scholarships for students. So there's Omni shambles, which the Oxford University, sorry, Oxford English Dictionary is defining as a situation that has been intentionally mismanaged characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations. I'd say the fairly good description of the design and introduction of the euro as a currency. So far I'd say that it was caused by the flaws in that single currency project from the start. Again, something I was arguing at the time in 1998 in a book called The Single European Currency in National Perspective, which even at the time I did put in the subtitle saying a community in crisis. So I think that has been true from the start. Secondly, of course, the bankers did gamble and they lost, which is fair enough. I mean, if you gamble, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. The difference was when they lost, when they gambled and they won, they kept their winnings, when they gambled and lost, they didn't pay for it. They were paid for by us, by the taxpayers, governments taking huge amounts of hundreds of billions of taxpayers' money to bail out the banks. And so what started off as a banking crisis then became a government debt crisis, a sovereign debt crisis, including across Europe. And on top of that, as well as the particular problem of the banks, all the financial institutions, obviously during this whole year of capitalism unleashed for spending their whole time, going to think up fancier derivatives, other financial products to sell to anyone who'd buy them, companies, but also governments. And Goldman Sachs actually used those financial markets to put on a big bet that Greece would fold, which they got into trouble and was discovered they had done that because they had inside information. They knew Greece was in trouble, you're not supposed to use inside information. They basically knew that the Greek government books had been cooked. Does anyone know why, how Goldman Sachs came by that insider information? Well, it was Goldman Sachs who had cooked the books themselves. And so there, which is why they knew. The conservative government, conservative governments in Greece had paid Goldman Sachs to do that for them. So Goldman Sachs did that, took the nice little owner, took the money and then went away and bet that Greece would fold. Well, Goldman Sachs was paid already. Oh, I see, in terms of the bets they put on, I think it was just on the selling on the government debt, which is all bought and sold in futures markets. And they knew that the price would fall because they'd cooked the books. So the government's response, I mean, obviously the high profile austerity cuts, the big news and what damage they're doing to universities and so on. And that's quite a well-known debate which I'm happy to discuss in questions and discussion. The problem about taking demand out of the economy and the danger that will lock economies into recession. But I wanted to talk about briefly, rather than that was the government's argument or acceptance that it does need to rebalance the economy, that the British economy had put all its eggs into the city of London, the financial sector, financial services sector. It needs to have a more reasonably diverse economy, more manufacturing and so on. And in their coalition agreement for the government's agenda, they do include supporting mutuals in order to do that, to promote more corporate diversity so that the financial services sector wouldn't be so dominated by just big shareholder and companies which again is a peculiarity, the British economy, there's no other economy does that to such an extent. And this is what it says in the coalition agreement, we agree to bring forward detailed proposals to foster diversity, promote mutuals and create a more competitive banking industry. Now I'd argue there's a range, I think I'm right to aim to do this, there's a range of benefits. Firstly, the advantage to the mutual model itself, the fact that it's owned by its customers and therefore there's an incentive for them to prioritize the interest of the customers and take long-term decisions in the long-term interest of the company which will pay back over the long term, they aren't subject to the same intense short-term pressure which to be fair to them, managing directors and shareholder and companies are subjected to sometimes very intense short-term pressure. Secondly, in addition to the benefits of that the mutual model itself, they do, and there's very firm evidence on this, they do provide competition to the shelter and banks being a different model and the shelter banks then are obliged and do respond to give better service to customers in order to meet what the mutuals are providing. And then thirdly, there's this systemic point which is that these organizations have very different business model, they take decisions at different time lengths, they react to events quite differently. So the resilience sector as a whole is much better to have these different source of organizations rather than just one type of organization like a row of dominoes which will all react in the same way and precipitate a sort of rush to the cliff which actually Keynes described discussing the way that stock markets and financial markets often worked with bubbles self-inflating. And this is again discussed in detail in this publication actually with the forward by Danny Alexander, the financial secretary to the Treasury, again all downloaded from the Kellogg website which very briefly argues that to promote diversity the government should be using the state-owned banks. We now own these, or largely own a lot of these big banks. The problem is they're just being left to themselves to carry on as if they were just still private banks and if they're not going to be used proactively to foster long-term investment and so on, they should be broken up and the relevant ones put back into the mutual sector, put in the mutual sector of those which had come from the mutual sector back. What's needed is the culture change though because one problem partly because the British economy is so peculiar in having such dominance from large shareholder-owned companies and large shareholder-owned banks. It means understandably everybody just sort of automatically assumes that's what a company is, that's what the sector is, that's what all regulation and laws should be designed for politicians, civil servants, regulators. And so what's needed there is a culture change so that regulators, civil servants and so on, think differently and don't think automatically big shareholder-owned PLC banks. And then finally trying to learn the lessons from the crunch, as Jack Welch, the American who was the one who actually firstly initiated this idea about shareholder value, the idea that the purpose of a company shouldn't be to deliver goods or services should be to maximize the return to the private shareholders. And it was actually him after the 2008 credit crunch who said that he thought that shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world despite the fact he'd come up with it. But it's good, you should give credit, where credit's due and when people learn, that's what lifelong learning's all about. So glad to see Jack Welch as one. Now I join the fold. And we did an additional publication looking particularly at Northern Rock which was one of these companies, like I say, that had actually come from the mutual sector. So the government had a very piece of low hanging fruit as they would say, a very easy way of taking at least a step towards their agreed goal of promoting mutuals to have a more diversified financial sector because they had this successful mutual organization which had become a bank, speculated, gone bankrupt and now owned by the government and the government outside what to do with it. So the obvious thing was to return it to the mutual sector, which is what we argued here. Surprise, surprise, they sold it to Richard Branson for a cut down price instead, which is a shame. And, well, I think that sort of attitude of optimizing this cartoon, that I think we're in good enough shape to start making the same mistakes again. And I think when they did that, they really did believe their own propaganda that things would just automatically recover, things would go better and actually they didn't need to stick to this coalition agreement to have a more diversified financial sector, things would just pick up automatically. Which I don't think is the case, but there was this ownership commission established which the center that I'm director of for mutual and employee business did the research for called the Ownership Commission. It was chaired by Will Hutton who actually at the time was head of the Work Foundation, although coincidentally he's now come to Oxford to be head of Hartford College. And it published a report early this year arguing in favor of greater plurality in corporate ownership, different forms of corporate ownership for precisely the reasons I was just arguing. Better stewardship of companies, those companies which RPLCs that they shouldn't just be managed and organized for the personal financial benefit of shareholders. They should take account of the long-term health of the company, the goods and services they produce, their customers, their suppliers, et cetera. And all sorts of organizations should have greater engagement of employees and those that have shareholders, greater engagement of those shareholders rather than just being owned by speculators who may own the share deliberately aiming to own it just for a few weeks and then sell it on as soon as the price is right. And again, that's the report from the Ownership Commission but again that is downloadable free of charge from the Kellogg website. That's the list of people. I'll just point out one, I mean it's a very good and interesting mix of people, most of them in the private sector, so it's significant that they did come up with those recommendations to have a more diverse corporate sector. And Sir Roger Carr was interesting because he's what chairman of Centrica, a big private company but also president of the Confederation of British Industry, the employers organization. And I think the reason he agreed to serve on the commission and was in favor of the recommendations is he was also chairman of Cadbury's when they were subjected to a hostile takeover bid from crafts. Now he said in confidence in the meeting, so don't tell anyone. And he said that him and the board thought actually the takeover wasn't in the best interest of the company, when the company was a good company, successful company, had a good future ahead of it. I mean obviously like all of us, no doubt they could do things better and they weren't small minded or anything. They were happy to think of any good suggestions for improving the performance of the company globally but they thought it was in the interest of the company to stay independent in the interest of their customers, their employees, their various stakeholders and so they opposed the bid and he was advised by the legal advice he took that even though that was his view, legally he had no choice but to accept the bid to put it to the shareholders and recommend it to the shareholders if they thought the price, the price was right, the price for the shares. They weren't allowed to reject the bid just on the grounds that it was in the interest of the company to remain independent, which he found quite shocking, I think. But that is still UK law. I think there's no other country in the world actually which makes it so easy for one of their companies just to be taken over from outside where there's no evidence that it would actually be in the interest of the company. It's just that it will make money for the company that wants to take them over. Obviously this is part of a longer debate which has gone on for a while about how to tackle short-termism because in this case it was a takeover from crafts and so sometimes it's depicted as a sort of nationalistic argument if you're opposed to it but actually the danger for a manager of any company in this country is it can be taken over by any other company. Doesn't matter what the nationality, it might be another British company, Hedge Fund or whatever thinks that well they could asset strip it and then sell it off for more money in a few months' time. So there has been a long-standing recognition that this puts pressure on managers and directors which may make them operate in ways which aren't necessarily in the best long-term interests of the company. They may think yes, they should commit most of the profits to long-term investments in new product development, staff training, but if they do that and don't give out any dividend, the share price will fall and that makes it easier for a hostile bidder to come up and buy up the company, get rid of that manager, move in themselves and so on. So it is a serious problem which has been discussed for a long time and very little as yet. Don't know about it. I think it's nicely depicted in this cartoon which is actually American but the same problem of short-termism affects both the British and American economies where dog birds, the consultant brought in by this company in trouble with their profits plunging. So the problem won't be easy to solve because the relative brain size of their competitors, fevers and you, there's board of directors, so the response of the board of directors is, so what should we do? Cut the training budget again, which is all too often what happens in British and American companies and what's needed is a more long-term approach, investing in people, obviously, in training skills, creating what's sometimes referred to as high-commitment work systems because if companies do invest in their people, they can get their employees to be more committed to the organization, obviously, than if the employees think the organization is just a short-term financial benefit of the shareholders and directors. And arrangements which encourage long-term investment, as I say, the danger of short-term takeover is a problem here, long-term investment, not only in the workforce but in the innovative capacity of the company and productive facilities. And also I'd say, and this is what I'll mention briefly, more collaboration, which is one area where other countries have been more successful thank them in the UK. When I was Dean of the Business School at the University of Birmingham, I got 3.6 million pounds from a fund called the Government Higher Education Innovation Fund to establish something called the Innovation Exchange, which was very useful. It had been operating successfully in Australia and actually the chair of the Innovation Exchange in Australia happened to be on my advisory board for the Business School and suggested it. And what it did is hire post-doc scientists who would work in a university lab one day a week, work in a company, one of its member companies, a company who joined the Innovation Exchange for one day a week, another company, another one day a week, always looking for potential profitable collaboration between companies where one company might have a problem, a bottleneck, and another might have a solution. And that's proved very successful, creating collaboration with food that just never occurred between those companies otherwise because Britain, most countries have got some sort of institutional structures like this to encourage these sort of collaborations and the UK has always been very weak at that. And it helps to build and maintain trust between those organisations, which I'd argue is a very important part of the economy which you don't always find in economics textbooks in reference to the importance of trust, but in reality, in real economies, that does play an important role. So to conclude, well, whatever's next, I think one important point to make is that the future's not inevitable or automatic and it certainly won't follow a sort of textbook economic model, the economy doesn't just write itself, it does depend what we as consumers and shareholders and managers do, but also what government and regulators do. And there is no reason why we shouldn't be stuck in recession for another year, two years, 10 years, 20 years as has happened to a certain extent in Japan, this lost decade, which is actually in the house of lost two decades where there, which was sparked by a similar sort of spectre frenzy and bubble bursting and the company's still sort of indebted sort of below the water and finding it difficult to re-enter investment and growth. So that is a real danger. We could go into triple dip recession. So it does need alternative policies. I'm now argued the importance of greater corporate diversity, which as I say, the government's committed to, but unfortunately not doing much about as yet. Long term is encouraging companies to take decisions for the long term rather than just the short term increase in share price that will get the managers and directors their share bonuses, investing in training, research and development, innovation and generally investing in people creating those high commitment work systems. One way that's actually beneficial for companies is just because the costs obviously of replacing people if they do move on is quite high, but also not always realize as if a company's investing in a really major new piece of equipment or factory for which they expect to pay back in over 10 or 20 years. Often the degree of payback they get in that new investment over 10 years is not just unknown, it's sort of unknowable. And it depends actually on how clever and incentivized and committed the employees are at introducing the new equipment, seeing how it can best be used, learning on the job and so on. So the productivity of employees isn't a known factor as economists always sort of have in equations. It does depend very much on how they're treated and managed in the workplace. And finally that point about corporate culture and encouraging cooperation and trust both internally within organizations and between. So that's my argument. I think I've left almost 10 minutes for questions, general discussion if anyone has any. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yes, no, I think that's right. And I think it's no, you know, no big surprise if I say that I think that, well, obviously that coalition agreement was, you know, the result of negotiation between two political parties and it was the Lib Dems obviously who are keen on the idea of mutuals and always have been as a party. And so that's what they have demanded as part of the coalition agreement. But yeah, I think the Conservative Party is not particularly committed to it. So I think that, yeah. Well, the Ownership Commission I was on is sort of supported by government but not an official committee. But yeah, I would say that basically the Conservative Party isn't particularly committed to mutuals or employer-owned organizations. I mean, obviously George Osborne did make his big announcement at the Conservative Party Conference in favour of employer ownership but that was if you take shares in your company you have to give up your employment rights. Including bizarrely sort of flexibility, the right for flexibility was normally the whole argument in favour of employer ownership and maybe more committed and more flexible and willing to go and do different jobs in the company and so on. So the idea that you should give up your employment rights in order to be an employer and organisation was just bizarre. So yes, I think it is, I mean, I think the Conservative Party isn't particularly committed to this diversity in the economy. I think they were forced to put that in by the Lib Dems and then actually haven't really done much about it because of the relative balance of power. But it's not being emblematic. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's only room for taxation to particularly on capital gains tax and change the capital gains so that you tax less for people with failed assets for a long period of time. Yeah, yes, yeah. No, I think there are specific things like that which can be done that abolishing this quarterly reporting because there's such a frenzy when a company comes out. There's no reason why you should publish the results every quarter. That just adds to the sort of feeding frenzy. But also, so I think all those small things are important but it's also important to put in the big picture as well to get over the sort of the cultural problem about this obsession that just shareholder value is the purpose of an organization. It's got to be remembered which is particularly relevant actually given these companies being bailed out. There is this idea of limited liability which of companies which means, okay, if I set up a company and it goes bankrupt and I owe you all money, okay, you can take what money's left there but you can't force me to sell my house and pay back the debts. Now, you might argue that's right or wrong but when that idea was first derived, as you can imagine, I think it would have been a strange idea. I mean, why shouldn't I pay my debts? And the idea was that there was some reciprocity. I was given, being given quite a privilege, I wouldn't have to sell my house and pay you all back. But in return, there should be some purpose to this company. I should be going to do something. I should build a railroad or produce some furniture or something, it shouldn't be just so I can personally enrich myself privately. I mean, where's the bargain in that? And that's been lost and that was the whole purpose of companies having sort of purposes and articles of association and so on. So I think, yeah, there are, specifically the interest could be done and it's a scandal really they've not been because of the problems being identified for decades about short-termism. So those short-term things should be done but within the larger context that companies should have a purpose and a loyalty to society. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. This is to attack on some financial spectative flows. Definitely, sometimes advocated just as another form of taxation so you could raise billions could be used for economic development, globally and so obviously would have a benefit if you did raise more money. But interestingly, it was proposed by James Tobin, an economist, Nobel Prize in economics. And sometimes economists think, oh, you've got to be careful pushing in taxes or regulations because you'll sort of stop the market mechanism working whereas his reason for proposing it was precisely that because he recognized that actually, you know, free markets can be devastatingly damaging and just allowing markets to shift money around the globe and have a spectative buying and selling of assets isn't necessarily helpful to the creation of real wealth. So his reason for introducing the tax actually wasn't all the benefits you could use the tax revenue for, although that's good. It was actually deliberately, he said to put sand in the wheels of the market to slow things down and focus people on doing real things rather than just speculation. And so I think actually, I hope it's time we'll finally have come after many decades of being ignored. I think it would be good. So we should end in a second, but why don't I take these final two and then we can carry on over a glass of wine. Right, it's huge. Do you actually be able to undertake the transfer work? Yes, if you are going along to a, you know, currently profitable, you know, shareholder and company, you're right. So it's not impossible, but it would be, you know, a big challenge. You need to basically, you know, borrow a lot of money to buy those shareholders and then, you know, accept that the services from that mutual would have to go to pay down the debt. But you're right, it is difficult if, you know, the companies currently have got a lot of shareholders, you know, making a lot of money, which, well, and that's why it's so, so annoying and tragic that the opportunity to the Northern Rock was passed up because that's where, you know, the government had to do something with it. And actually the, and what we may clear to the government, although they denied and denied though we had done, was that the government could have got more money if that was their priority, I mean, it shouldn't be their priority. Their priority should have been to rebalance the economy as they said it was. But if that was their priority, they could have got more money by re-mutualizing it than from Richard Branson. Because the point, but it would have taken time, they would have to take, the only downside is they'd have to take a long-term view, which I would just be saying would actually be a good thing, not a bad thing. Because the mutual would have then paid back the government, you know, its surplus or 8% for surplus a year, either until some figure had been hit, 400 million, 500 million, or over a certain number of years. But they could have, you know, had a figure of 700 million and they would have had, they would have carried on paying back until, until that figure had been hit. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, so take one last one. Yeah, quite a few questions down on that last one. Yeah, I'm sure that's part of it. Yeah, I'm the manufacturing question, the very, very good one and quite complex because you're absolutely right. And, and obviously, you know, you might think, well, we can't go back to, you know, building ships or whatever. But yeah, well, well, hey, they do. I don't know, but I actually agree with you because the point is there's lots of new manufacturing, manufacturing products, you know, just, you know, the iPhone and the Blackberry. And I mean, we sometimes think as if, or it's sometimes said that manufacturing is something of the past. Exactly, no, you're absolutely right. No, I mean, Britain should, you know, do, could and should do better. And, you know, the government has said that, that was part of re-bouncing the, the economy. And, and, no, no, you're right. But they, they could and should, and I'd say all the things I've, I've said, you know, would help manufacturing. I mean, the, the manufacturing companies do need long-term finance, you know, pleasure over 10 years, which again has always been a problem in the British financial system, even where they provide money to a manufacturing company. It's often as a, as an overdraft, overdraft facility. No, exactly, and that's, yeah. Why don't we continue this over a glass of wine? Thank you all very much.