Worse, people can decide to cut you out entirely and then you're completely scuppered. This is the fate now hitting insurance brokers, where commission rates have fallen to wafer-thin levels. In the jargon of financial markets, it is known as disintermediation. Companies, rather than going to insurance brokers to obtain quotes, have been going directly to suppliers of insurance, or have set up their own captive insurance operations to fulfil requirements.Willis Corroon (142p) is one such firm whose recent performance has been uncompelling.

Although pre-tax profit is likely to be up from the pounds 50m recorded in 1995, to around pounds 85m, growth in sales will be minimal. In other words, the only advances are coming from improvements on the cost side - a limited route for much further growth. The shares remain a sell.The complex scheme unveiled by Yorkshire Water (736.5p) to return pounds 145m to shareholders may have had the City dancing. But the message it gives to the regulator - and any incoming Labour government - is of an industry still flooded with cash and with no sensible idea of what to do with the money. The fact that benefits to the customer at Yorkshire and most other water companies are far less easy to spot only raises the odds of some sort of retribution from Labour.The regulator, too, must be busy calculating if the current regime achieves the right balance between the interests of shareholders and consumers. Either way, the sector as a whole looks increasingly a sell, the closer the election comes..

Poor Mr Okuda. Little did he think, when he chatted about his future business investment plans, that he would incite such a ferocious reaction from the politicians of a little country half a globe away. But when the Toyota president said his company would reconsider its investment strategy if Britain stayed out of a single currency, all hell broke loose. Obviously the prospect of losing all those lovely car plants and electronics factories constructed courtesy of The-Rest-of-the-World plc is rather galling. And of course anything which parachutes into this pre-election climate and mentions the dreaded EMU, was bound to be provocative. Nevertheless, the furore was astounding. Euro-sceptics spat with indignation. What, you could hear them saying, did this upstart of a foreigner have to tell us about running our economy? So what if he is the head of Japan's biggest car manufacturer? But underlying their vehemence lay a deep and niggling anxiety: that we might after all be driven into a single currency against our will by the inexorable forces of global competition.For Sir James Goldsmith, the Toyota palaver will have been particularly galling Sir James has never been an enthusiast for free trade.

The thought that the British government could be rendered impotent, its sovereignty undermined, by the fancies of footloose multinationals will infuriate him even further.But Sir James could seek reassurance from an unexpected source. Academics Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, writing in the new magazine Soundings, claim that governments have no need to worry about the pressures of the global market or the demands of multinationals Globalisation is, they maintain, a bit of a myth. Multinationals putting pressure on governments are, in Mr Hirst's words, "trying it on". In fact, the academics claim, companies rarely uproot and leave when governments misbehave.Therefore, following the logic of the Hirst-Thompson argument, governments should pay no attention to the implicit threats of Japanese car manufacturers. Instead, politicians should stop being wimps and do what they want.But both these extreme views - that governments are impotent and that governments are omnipotent - are nonsense. National governments are extremely important in the global market and will remain so, even if their currencies are subsumed within a larger euro.

But they cannot just ignore the way economies work and the changes that have taken place in the world over the past 50 years.Hirst and Thompson, in their attempt to debunk the idea that governments are powerless in the new global economy, do make some important points. They are right, for example, to say that global competition does not mean that wages in Britain need fall so that British products can compete with those made in developing countries. As they explain, if developing countries really did suck away all our manufacturing and jobs, as the alarmists sometimes predict, their wages would start to rise pretty fast. Moreover, the idea that countries like Britain need to slash their overall tax burden and the level of public spending because otherwise companies, investment and people will flee abroad is a complete myth.Nevertheless, Hirst and Thompson hopelessly overstate their case.