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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (55112)	10/29/2004 10:58:20 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

Robert Horton was BP boss in my time. I felt sorry for him. He was booted out after a while having worked all his life to get to the top. He seemed to be desperate to gain the approval of the aristocrats. I recall a picture of him beaming with delight at an investiture or something [with the Queen there]. The rest of the time he was more mechanical. John Browne seems to be all-round great. He was up and coming in my day and has done very well since. Privatisation is generally completely mismanaged and monopoly profits are given away at absurdly cheap prices to private interests. The private interests tend to bid low because there is always the risk that governments will regulate their profits, so they can't afford to bid what the market would bear in a free market. I'm not surprised the rail privatisation was a shambles [if it was and I suppose it was, though I know almost nothing about it]. The rail privatisation here was absurd with huge profits going to opportunists who cleaned it out and abandoned a literally rusting hulk. There is talk of privatizing water supplies here, which I'm in favour of, but only after taxes and rates are replaced with water charges, telephone charges, power supply charges, gas pipeline charges. The city should squeeze those merchants and extract every possible cent, raising prices until sufficient people install their own roof water collection systems, on-site waste water disposal [evaporation and combustion for example], wireless telecoms, on-site electricity generation and so on, that the profits are maximized. Don't forget road tolls too. All taxes could be collected from public assets I suspect instead of from sales taxes, various duties, company tax and income tax. A no-tax, highly efficient, highly secure country would be great. Security of supply is best achieved with distributed supplies. Citizenship should be a tradable commodity. Mqurice