Business

If only the Chilean miners could be replaced by double-dip doomsters

4 September 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

If life was a Doctor Who series and I was the scriptwriter, I would have the courageous Chilean miners tele-ported instantaneously to the surface — and replaced at the bottom of the collapsed shaft by 33 gloomy economists and market commentators. They would range from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who says that the present recovery isn’t really a recovery at all, to Société Générale strategist Albert Edwards, who says investors should brace for a ‘bloodbath’ as the US slides back into recession. Instead of the antidepressants that are being sent down to keep the miners’ spirits from sinking,...

Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’d like to be a fly on the wall when Sir Philip meets Sir Humphrey

28 August 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

The appointment of fashion re-tailer Sir Philip Green to be David Cameron’s adviser on public-sector waste looks even more improbable than Sir Richard Branson’s stint as Margaret Thatcher’s ‘litter tsar’. The BHS billionaire and the Virgin balloonist both operate through offshore private companies partly because they can, but mostly because their maverick business styles and uneasy relations with the media just don’t suit them to the public arena. But both (like Alan Sugar, Labour’s distinctly uncomfortable ‘enterprise tsar’) have an aura of celebrity that politicians hope will rub off: hence Cameron’s choice of Green rather than the less glamorous Simon...

Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (0)

A lesson from Warren Buffett: giving it away is more fun than sitting on it

14 August 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

‘If the rich really wish to create a better world, they can sign another pledge: to pay their taxes on time and in full; to give their employees better wages... and working conditions; to use production methods that don’t kill or maim or damage the environment...’ That was Peter Wilby in the Guardian, responding to the news last week that 40 American billionaires have pledged to donate half (or in Warren Buffett’s case, 99 per cent) of their fortunes to good causes. Wilby perfectly encapsulates the British left’s contempt for the notion of charitable giving funded by free-market capitalism —...

Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (0)

Banks behaving badly, yet again: what they need are steadier relationships

7 August 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

It’s nonsense to accuse high street banks of failing to lend to businesses because the money they might have lent has been siphoned off for bonuses — that just isn’t how it works — and it’s good news that they have been announcing restored or increased profits this week. It’s also absurd to claim that George Osborne and Vince Cable should or could instruct them how to lend. And in any case, an optimist might say, the indicators are moving in the right direction: what with higher than expected growth in the second quarter, an uptick in manufacturing and a...

Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (1)

As Hayward becomes the new Sir Fred, who will be Bob Dudley’s role model?

31 July 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

I told you so — and I might even have said it first. ‘Hayward may have to be sacrificed,’ I wrote on 5 June. ‘In that case, the next man in the line of fire could be Bob Dudley, who has the advantage of being an American…’ I might have added that Dudley came into BP (where he takes over as chief executive on 1 October) by way of its 1998 takeover of Amoco, where he was a rising star; and the name Amoco is a contraction of ‘American Oil Company’, making President Obama’s symbolic victory over ‘British Petroleum’ complete.

...

Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cornering the cocoa market may rob us of much needed moments of pleasure

24 July 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

A London hedge fund, Armajaro, has cornered the market in cocoa, for which prices have already risen by 150 per cent over two years. Armajaro is reported to have paid £650 million to take delivery of 240,000 tonnes of beans, all the cocoa there is in Europe in fact, and no one seems to know what they plan to do with it — other than reap a huge profit. This is the sort of trade that earned hedge funds a bad name two years ago, when grain and soy prices soared — though investment banks, which regard ‘soft commodities’ as...

Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (0)