Week Ending: Accountants cause a stir in legal sector; Major CH Douglas

BIG FOUR firm PwC’s advance into the legal services has left the top tier firms wondering which teams will be raided for talent.

PwC Legal has just hired Neal Shepherd, a former corporate partner at DLA Piper and Addleshaw Goddard to lead its charge into the sector, and during a visit to one leading firm ths week, there was a noticeable degree of nervousness as to the accountants’ intentions.

One legal big hitter said: “I think everyone is wondering where Shep is going to look. We think he’ll be after at least three or four good people, it’s the talk of the market as to who he’ll go after.”

With KPMG also making waves in the sector after the hire of Nick Roome last year, it’ll be interesting to see if and when EY and Deloitte will join the bandwagon too in this region.

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WEEK Ending stumbled across the story of Major CH Douglas this week – an amateur economist who shook up the establishment with his radical ideas during the depression years of the 1920s.

He was an engineer by trade and applied this way of thinking to economics, forming the view that the cost of producing everything always grew at a faster rate than the distribution of incomes. He said this left many people unable to afford the products being made which caused a lack of purchasing power.

This was at odds with Say’s Law, the assertion in classical economics that production creates an equal quantity of demand. Douglas’s assumption about wages does explain the rise of consumer credit which has fuelled the economy in recent years and allowed people to buy the things they may not be able to afford on their wages.

But his most radical plan was for a ‘social credit’, a kind of citizen dividend paid to everyone, irrespective of their earnings from other endeavours. He felt people needed a basic income and the economy needed them to have it. This money would be created and distributed by the Government calculated to offset the debt generated by the banking system. It was a popular idea and social credit political parties were launched in many countries, but the movement fizzled out after the war.

And like many radical thinkers before him, CH Douglas was from Manchester. Well, Edgeley in Stockport to be precise.

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