Business

Trust in a market where it pays to deceive?

6 March 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

I can’t claim to have invented the off-balance-sheet sleight-of-hand used by the Greek government, under the guidance of Goldman Sachs, to beggar itself so spectacularly. But I was certainly a pioneer in the field. Long ago, at Barclays, I devised a scheme to help a famous brewery (now, needless to say, a ‘hotel and leisure group’ operating under a different name) to deceive investors and analysts into believing its debts were smaller than they really were. My handiwork en-abled the brewer to borrow a seven-figure sum in order to lend smaller parcels of cash to its tied pubs — but...

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A VAT rise may be no laughing matter, but it’s better than the alternatives

27 February 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

And so to VAT — an opening that I realise sounds about as enticing as a job ad for a shorthand typist in the Prime Minister’s office. Frankly, I doubt even Bob Monkhouse had a decent gag about VAT in his repertoire. But like many things that are not funny — Jonathan Ross hosting the Bafta awards, for example — tax on consumption is an inescapable fact of modern life. So, having ducked the topic last week in favour of high-class name- dropping, I’ll do my best this week, prompted by a Conservative statement that ‘We have absolutely no plans...

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If you don’t want to be treated as crooks, stop mugging your high-street customers here please

20 February 2010
Martin Vander Weyer

‘I don’t want to be treated like a criminal,’ a senior Barclays trader told me recently, in a slightly menacing European accent. That gives you a clue that he was not Bob Diamond, the bank’s American president, or John Varley, its very English chief executive, who have both foregone cash bonuses for 2009 despite record profits of £11.6 billion. No, my acquaintance will certainly have shared in the Barclays Capital bonus-pot, so he should be feeling more like a Euro-lottery winner than a prisoner in the stocks. But the token self-restraint of his bosses will do little to deflect the...

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‘Read this and weep’: lessons not learned from Slater Walker

13 February 2010
Richard Northedge

In the permanently uneasy truce between Threadneedle Street and Whitehall, Bank of England governor Mervyn King has never been shy of publicly criticising the Treasury. But confidential files on a banking crisis of 35 years ago show that private comments between the two institutions can be even more caustic. A civil servant’s handwritten note on a letter from the Bank during the Slater Walker crisis in 1975 says, ‘Read this and weep.’ His boss scribbles back: ‘I have read — and spat blood at this unjustified complacency.’

Over the previous decade, the firm of Slater Walker had grown spectacularly to...

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Mutual satisfaction

13 February 2010
Dominic Prince

I don’t know about you, but I get infuriated by insurance. Motor insurance, household insurance, pet insurance. Some, like cover for your car, you have to have by law. Other stuff, like cover for your cat or the contents of your house, you don’t. A great deal of insurance is unnecessary and costly. Is it worth insuring an old banger comprehensively? No. Is it worth insuring paintings? Probably not: nicked pictures have little re-sale value and your average burglar wouldn’t know a Van Gogh from your great-aunt’s holiday daub anyway.

Each year when the premiums are due, I shudder at...

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Billions more mouths to feed

13 February 2010
Dominic Midgley

Food security is the new energy security. So says Susan Payne, chief executive of Emergent Asset Management, a Surrey-based company which claims to run the biggest agricultural fund in Africa following the launch of its first fund less than 18 months ago.

Payne, a Canadian who cut her teeth as an emerging-markets expert first at JPMorgan and then at Goldman Sachs, attracts investors by conjuring up the Malthusian devil. The world’s population is set to grow by 2 billion to 9.1 billion over the next 40 years; feeding the children of tomorrow will require a 50 per cent increase in...

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