James Doran
Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics
Joyce Purnick
Public Affairs £13.59, 272 pages
ISBN 1586485776
✆ £12.79 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655
It is election season in New York City, and it is impossible to turn around without bumping into Mike Bloomberg, the media mogul turned politician who is running for a controversial third term as mayor.
Given the Mikey-mania currently overwhelming the city, Joyce Purnick timed the publication of her forthcoming biography, Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics, very well.
And you would think that someone as accomplished as Bloomberg would make a superb subject for...
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3 October 2009
Martin Vander Weyer
Several national newspapers lazily copied each other last week in describing me as ‘a former speechwriter to Shriti Vadera’ — the business minister who is leaving the government to become Gordon Brown’s emissary to the G20, and perhaps to prepare the way for his post-election role as director-general of a new economic world order of his own devising. As it happens, I am indeed her former speechwriter, but only in the rather limited sense that the late Bob Monkhouse is my former speechwriter: that is, I occasionally use one of Bob’s jokes, and my old friend Shriti once used one...
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3 October 2009
Karl Ludvigsen
It’s an axiom of auto-makers — as it is of most producers of goods — that they are squeezed between suppliers and customers. Upstream suppliers have options to reduce costs and improve profits while their customers downstream, the retailers, can set prices to suit their markets. Although the producer likes to think of himself as king, in fact his thankless task is to squeeze such profit as he can from the narrow margin between supplier and customer. So why, you may well ask, does Magna International, a Canadian supplier of vehicle components, unheard of to the British and European public,...
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3 October 2009
Christopher Fildes
The best moment in a chancellor’s life comes early. ‘Mr Deputy Speaker,’ he says, ‘we have examined the books. The position is grave. My first duty is to put the public finances in order.’ He then sends for the Hungarian middle-distance runner, Savij Kutz.
This bogeyman, first identified by Alan Watkins, has been off the track for years but is making a comeback. Nick Clegg for the Lib Dems gave him a friendly wave. Gordon Brown mutters his surname through gritted teeth. David Cameron lets it be known that he wouldn’t want Kutz to be confrontational. He may not have...
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26 September 2009
Matthew Lynn
One year on from the period of panic that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers, you might be forgiven for thinking the worst of the credit crunch was over. The banking system has steadied. The stock market looks perky. The housing market is limping out of the convalescent ward.
The trouble is, you’d be wrong. The credit crunch has a nasty little sibling, with whom we are yet to be fully acquainted. Call it the credit card crunch — except it’s not so much a crunch as the financial equivalent of a full-scale pile-up on the M1. The British, like...
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26 September 2009
Allister Heath
If John Maynard Keynes were alive today, he would be appalled at the disastrous state of our public finances. He is loved and hated in equal measure as the man who made pump-priming during downturns intellectually respectable. But nothing he ever wrote could be used to justify the scandalous mess in which Gordon Brown has landed Britain.
Not only has Keynes been body-snatched by advocates of big state spending, but he finds himself in the battleground for the next general election. At Labour’s conference next week, the Prime Minister will say that Labour must be re-elected precisely because it will...
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