Why Channel 4 shouldn’t be privatised

Enough of stagflation forecasts, each more frightening than the last. Enough – for now – of energy policy sermons, as the government at last proclaims a serious nuclear plan. Instead, let’s have a week of real business stories, starting with tales of the old and new City.

First, a rum do at the London Metal Exchange. The Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority are investigating the exchange’s handling, last month, of a ‘short squeeze’ on nickel, provoked by fear of disrupted supplies from Russia. The metal’s price rocketed 250 per cent in two days to trade briefly above $100,000 a ton, reportedly leaving a Chinese tycoon called Xiang ‘Big Shot’ Guangda with a short position that could have cost his Shanghai–based company Tsingshan Holdings $8 billion; one of Tsingshan’s backers was the state-owned China Construction Bank, which was allowed extra time to pay Tsingshan’s margin calls.

Meanwhile, nickel trading was suspended for a week, the first LME stoppage since 1985 – and $3.9 billion of trades done as the price spiked on 8 March were arbitrarily cancelled, leaving holders of long positions puzzled and angry. The price has since settled back to $33,000 and, we might guess, a lot of Chinese bacon has been saved. But who owns the LME these days? That would be Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Ltd, whose biggest shareholder is Hong Kong’s puppet government. Regulators might like to start by asking whether the episode attracted any signals from Beijing.

Name-change trauma

Next, whatever happened to Smith & Williamson? This bespoke wealth manager, well appreciated by an unflashy upper–middle-class customer base, seems to have fallen victim to the name-change trauma that (as with Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset Management, absurdly unvowelled as ‘Abrdn’) afflicts component firms in unhappy mergers.