Business

Alternatives to poppy-farming and gun-slinging

14 November 2009
Katrina Manson

I finally get to ask my question of the man who says he knows every statistic in a notoriously data-less country. ‘OK, mister-chief-statistics-officer-for-the-province,’ I say in my best Pashtu, with a little help from my ever-smiling interpreter. ‘Do you know how many businesses there are in Helmand?’ He gives a multi-syllabic answer. I wait keenly for the translation. ‘Yes. None.’

It’s not the best news for Afghanistan’s most conservative and dangerous province. But it might help form part of the answer to why it’s proving so tough to dislodge the Taleban. There’s little other than poppy-growing and gun-slinging in the...

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Santander: the bank that escaped the credit crunch

14 November 2009
Matthew Lynn

If ever a banking deal came with the curse of the black spot, it was the takeover of Dutch bank ABN Amro at the height of the last boom in 2007. Three European banks teamed up to launch a hostile £49 billion raid, the largest financial takeover in European history. Two of them went to a horrible fate: our own Royal Bank of Scotland, which dreamed up the deal, had to be rescued by Gordon Brown, while the Belgium-Dutch group Fortis was itself nationalised soon afterwards. But the third partner, Banco Santander of Spain, not only survived the ABN deal...

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In the boardroom

14 November 2009
Richard Northedge

One of the oft-repeated excuses for high executive pay is the need to compete for top talent in an international market. A scan through a list of heads of FTSE 100 companies certainly shows just how many boards go abroad for their boss: 41 of the UK’s top 100 chief executives are foreigners, including three who are now naturalised Brits. They come from 14 different countries, from Mexico to the Ivory Coast and India. But a market ought to be a two-way exchange, and while we import senior managers from overseas, where are the British businessmen heading foreign public companies?...

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City pay is no side issue: it’s an affront to society

7 November 2009
Roger Bootle

The smart thing to say — indeed, Allister Heath said it in last week’s issue — about bankers’ pay is that it doesn’t really matter: it’s a distraction from more serious concerns about regulation or the structure of the financial system. Supposedly, people who express amazement and disgust at what bankers receive are motivated by feelings of envy, and they just don’t understand the way the City works. If a bunch of bankers makes a few hundred million pounds or dollars — it hardly matters which currency the amount is denominated in — by trading options on the volatility in...

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Put the lights back on: shale gas has arrived

7 November 2009
George Trefgarne

Fretting about an impending energy apocalypse has long been a diverting parlour game of the chattering classes. Projections are drawn up showing that the last drop of petrol will be squeezed into the last 4x4 in about 50 years’ time. It is said that Britain, forced by the European Union to retire a third of its coal-power stations, will soon be unable to meet its energy demands; the lights will go out within a decade. It seems almost a shame to spoil the gloom by discussing something that has already turned the American energy debate upside down: shale gas.

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No longer proud to wear the tartan?

7 November 2009
Bill Jamieson

Scotland’s fortitude has certainly been tested these past 12 months. Its proud claim to have a special excellence in finance — an innate canniness and caution — has been shattered by the demise of its two banks headquartered in Edinburgh, Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS. It didn’t matter that New York, London, Dublin and Frankfurt also suffered blows to their banking systems. These were blows that Scots took personally, a wound to our very definition. Scotland was whisky, lochs, glens, tartan — and banks. There were also, of course, other stains on the brand, at least as far as...

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