&ldquo;The Scream&rdquo; has long been a cultural icon. The image of a terrified man on a bridge in Edvard Munch&rsquo;s 1895 pastel captured something about the dark forces of the modern age. Now his 4,661 square centimetres of board has become a financial icon of the post-modern era.

The soft sound of money

Business Standard

There&rsquo;s no such thing as a free lunch. Economist Milton Friedman was fond of the phrase, but in economics it is deeply misleading. Economic growth is basically a free lunch &mdash; the same amount of labour produces more goods and services. That&rsquo;s a banquet for developing countries, and more than a snack for already-rich Germany. The 0.5 per cent increase in first quarter gross domestic product (GDP) is the latest sign. Experts were surprised by the good German number, but they frequently underestimate the productive power of good policies and strong economic institutions.

That old lie

Companies are broken up when managers think the whole is worth less than the sum of the parts. Smaller enterprises are more flexible, they say, than incompatible organisations artificially joined into a single, excessively bureaucratic entity. Investors often agree and share prices commonly rise on rumours of a split. The euro is clearly different. The fear of a break-up is making the single currency fall.

Backhanded compliment

There isn&rsquo;t just one euro crisis. There are four. Each could probably be managed on its own. But the combination increasingly looks toxic.

Tangled skein

The price of oil is a barometer. Friday&rsquo;s fall of Brent crude to below $100 a barrel, for the first time since February 2011, shows that financial conditions and investor sentiment are bleak.

Nothing doing

Shale gas accounts for less than one per cent of worldwide energy use at present. But fracking is a growth business, and shale oil prospects are also altering the global hydrocarbon equation. The additional supply could change the geo-political and geo-financial landscape.

Shale geo-scale

The Bank of England had a bad crisis. It needs a major rethinking of its role, goals and operating philosophy. The opportunity is at hand.

Outside the broken box

In most aspects of current affairs, the world's traditional economic leaders are losing ground to developing nations. But when it comes to top quality universities, the old powers remain firmly in the lead. Of the top 200 universities in the world, 42 per cent are in Europe and another 42 per cent in the United States and Canada. Add in the countries which are basically European and American settlements - Israel, Australia and New Zealand - and the West's share comes to 90 per cent. Those countries account for only 50 per cent of global GDP.

Residual glory

Never underestimate the power of a government which changes its mind. The managers of Starbucks might want to contemplate that adage. The US-based coffee chain reported last year a loss of &pound;33 million on revenue of &pound;398 million at its UK subsidiary for tax purposes, according to a Reuters report. The company does not disclose accounting results by country, but operating profit margin of the international business stood at 13 per cent.

Careful

The BBC is learning one of the hardest lessons of institutional management. The UK broadcaster has never hesitated to report scandal in other organisations. It has told the world about nursing homes which mistreat residents, the Catholic church&rsquo;s problems with sexual abuse and oil producer BP&rsquo;s apparent inability to put safety far in front of profit. But the Jimmy Savile affair shows self-correction is easier to preach than to practice.

Savile rows

The Euro zone economy remains mired in an apparently endless gyration between anaemic recovery and shallow recession. Last week&rsquo;s weak surveys of purchasing managers were the lowest value since June 2009 and GDP is still about one per cent below the peak level of 2008. After several years of poor growth in GDP, a decline is expected this year.

Continental drift

The tension over Sunday&rsquo;s Greek election is almost palpable. The financial world is watching Athens as if this vote, the second in two months, will change history dramatically for the worse. It just might, but probably won&rsquo;t. But either way, the world economy will remain troubled for years.

Grexcessive concern

The gloom-and-doom brigade has had a second-class crisis. For four years, prognosticators of calamity have eagerly awaited the end. They expected the financial mess and draining recession to become a disaster which would shake the modern global economy to its foundations. It hasn&rsquo;t turned out that way.

Waiting room

Academic economists discussing the future of the euro tend to bring up the theory of optimal currency area. It explains that the merger of currencies only makes economic sense if the economies are more efficient with one rather than with many currencies and if the additional efficiency is more valuable than the loss of policy flexibility inside the zone.

Ideas live on

Auctions are exciting. When governments run them, the revenue gained can look like money for nothing. The Dutch government just collected euro 3.8 billion from auctioning off the spectrum needed for 4G mobile telephony. That money, though, comes from somewhere.

Bad contract

Mark Carney has missed an opportunity. More accurately, the current governor of the Bank of Canada and the future governor of the Bank of England has inadvertently shown that in intellectual terms central bankers are all at sea. His suggestion that &ldquo;nominal GDP targeting&rdquo; might help in exceptional times is not so much wrong as irrelevant.

Idea deficit

The god that failed is losing its last adherents. Eric Hobsbawm, who has died at age 95, was an eminent historian who said earlier this year he was &ldquo;slowly edging clear of the original world hope of October 1917&rdquo;. As the generation of the unabashedly Marxist Hobsbawm passes, it leaves a gap. The financial crisis showed something is wrong with the modern, capitalist consensus, but the next big idea remains undiscovered.

Literally dying

No one should doubt that Viviane Reding has good intentions. The EU&rsquo;s justice commissioner believes that she is righting a wrong with her plan to require European companies above a modest size to reserve at least 40 percent of the non-executive board positions for women. But the idea is wrongheaded.

Sexual tension

In today&rsquo;s China, a $2.4-billion spending plan from a city of two million people that few foreigners could place on a map raises few eyebrows. Xiangtan&rsquo;s investment wish-list has more to recommend it than some of the $1 trillion or so of multi-year projects announced over the last few months. But like them, it reflects China&rsquo;s development stresses.

Forwards and backwards

Here is a fantasy. During a press conference, the chairman of the People&rsquo;s Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, says: &ldquo;The need to create jobs should concern everyone in China.&rdquo; He explains that an undervalued yuan supports exports and a large trade surplus keeps away imports, which would take away Chinese jobs. Zhou does not mention any possible international dislocations from this stimulative currency policy.

Turning Chinese

Shareholders do their best to find the right price and estimate fair values in corporate transactions, and then factor in premiums for relinquishing control. In the proposed tie-up of miner-trader Glencore with Xstrata, a pure miner, investor pressure forced Glencore to improve the terms. Elsewhere, investors have reduced the total market capitalisation of EADS and BAE after the aerospace companies said they were considering a merger.

Edward Hadas