A racket growing faster than bitcoin

The best way to allow entrepreneurs to thrive is to slash onerous regulations, says Matthew Lynn.

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Jean-Claude Juncker: a man with expensive tastes
(Image credit: 2017 Getty Images)

Even when Jean-Claude Juncker is ordering from the wine list, €1.7bn still buys a lot of lunch. That is the vast sum spent by companies on lobbying the officials and parliamentarians of the EU, the website Politico revealed this month. The number of registered lobbyists has multiplied 35-fold in the last decade it is probably the only business that's growing faster than bitcoin.

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Matthew Lynn

Matthew Lynn is a columnist for Bloomberg, and writes weekly commentary syndicated in papers such as the Daily Telegraph, Die Welt, the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post and the Miami Herald. He is also an associate editor of Spectator Business, and a regular contributor to The Spectator. Before that, he worked for the business section of the Sunday Times for ten years. 

He has written books on finance and financial topics, including Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis and The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031. Matthew is also the author of the Death Force series of military thrillers and the founder of Lume Books, an independent publisher.