Business
Bill Jamieson
Our fate was sealed. Escape seemed impossible. But avoiding a re-run of the 1930s Great Depression is set to prove the big global surprise of 2009. However, there is another one. The dramatic recoveries across the economies of south-east Asia may rank even higher on the big surprise board. A year ago, Asia’s emerging economies, cast as chronically dependent on exports to the now stricken economies of the West, looked set for a re-run of the region’s financial crisis of 1997/98, only worse. The area looked doomed to a decade of lost growth.
Notions of economic and financial de-coupling...
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Roger Field
Edged weapons – from mediaeval and renaissance weaponry to the small swords of the 18th century – have been the best performers in the broader arms and armour market during the past decade. In particular, eastern and Russian pieces have done spectacularly well.
Robert Hales, who deals in fine eastern arms and armour in London, attributes their explosion in price to several factors. First, and most obvious, is the amount of Arab and Russian money that has been available. These collectors are anxious to buy their heritage back and are willing to dig deep to get what they want....
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Chris Wright
On 30 June, in a ballroom in Kuala Lumpur’s Shangri-La hotel, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak made a landmark announcement: the abolition of a long-standing rule that 30 per cent of equity in new share offerings must be allocated to Bumiputras, or ethnic Malays. It doesn’t sound much but both practically and symbolically, it was a highly significant moment.
Around 100 days into his term of office, Najib had abolished part of the New Economic Policy (NEP), an affirmative action programme put in place by his father, Tun Abdul Razak, as Prime Minister in 1971.
Implemented at a time...
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Veronica Wordsworth
Before I met Justin, I thought that compensation was something people in the West Midlands got if they tripped over a paving stone, or said they had. But he learned enough in the City to stop him asking in job interviews, ‘What about the pay?’ It’s compensation he asks about now. Not that he gets the job.
‘Public opinion has been flabbergasted, horrified, by compensation paid to traders,’ said Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, last month. But for non-combatants in the financial sector, compensation still sounds puzzling.
I wondered where this legalistic-sounding term came from, and thought at first...
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Felix Salmon
When the leaders of the world’s 20 most important countries flew away from Pittsburgh in September, they left behind them a typically cobbled-together communiqué, ranging from grand-yet-empty rhetoric (‘We pledge to adopt the policies needed to lay the foundation for strong, sustained and balanced growth in the 21st century’) to the ridiculously arcane (‘We support the introduction of a leverage ratio as a supplementary measure to the Basel II risk-based framework with a view to migrating to a Pillar 1 treatment based on appropriate review and calibration’).
The problem was that the financial markets barely paid the heads of state...
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Laura Staples
You didn’t get your bonus, your shares have dwindled and the price of your house has sunk. And to top it all off, your trophy wife’s had enough. The good news, though, is that it’s the perfect time to get divorced – that is, if you’re the high earner in the family.
‘If you’re the paying party, you really want to get your divorce sorted out now as quickly as possible before things start improving,’ says forensic accountant John Frenkel. His argument is simple. If you’re going to have to hand over 50 per cent of your assets to your...
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