Business
Chris Blackhurst
When Kraft said it wanted to buy Cadbury – and the chocolate maker rejected the opening offer – a dance not seen in the City for many a year began. Investment bankers from both sides assembled their teams. Lawyers and accountants were drafted in. PRs were let loose to win hearts and minds. Rival food companies and their advisers studied the action carefully. Fund managers did their sums. The Takeover Panel, that most august of City bodies, was on alert. The tactics meetings, conference calls, briefings and counter-briefings began in earnest.
It was exciting, exhilarating even: the sort of blood-and-guts...
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3 October 2009
Patagonia
Lucinda Baring
Arriving in Patagonia, the region spanning Argentina and Chile at the southernmost tip of South America, I really felt I’d reached the end of the earth. The journey is an epic but rewarding one – this was the most spectacular scenery I’d ever seen. My destination was Hotel Explora in the Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. This small enclave of comfort, surrounded by wide green lagoons and sheltered by snow-capped mountains, is designed specifically to cosset you after a day spent amongst the elements. Windows span the length of every room and with no...
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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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