The bureaucrats fingering their fiats for cunning ways to turn the Big Four into a Big Six or even Eight are doomed to abject failure.
You often wonder whether anyone in government has a profound understanding of how business works. Take the lengthy saga of hand-wringing over the fact that there is not really enough choice among audit firms capable of dealing with the largest companies in the land.
Forget for a moment that the reason there is now only a “Big Four” against the one-time “Big Eight” can be laid in part at the door of governments and regulators. Consider, instead, the spectacle of the Department of Trade and Industry and the Office of Fair Trading heaving themselves onto a treadmill of successive projects to work out how to increase the choice. The fact that, as anyone in the business could tell them, there is no way to undo the past seems to be neither here nor there. Onwards they drive, applying the ineluctable logic of civil servants, without seeming to notice that business and the markets simply do not work like that.
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