Society

Wednesday

Matthew Lynn

The men who called the markets right

It has been a terrible 12 months for investors. It didn’t make much difference whether you invested in stocks, commodities or corporate bonds, the chances were you took a hammering. Even gold failed to sparkle as the credit crunch cut a swath through every kind of asset class. And yet there were a few individuals who managed to make fortunes as the markets tumbled. In the US, John Paulson cleaned up by betting big against the subprime mortgage market. Over here, amid the general gloom along Mayfair’s Hedge Fund Alley, there were a couple of money managers who could still afford somewhere better than Pret a Manger for lunch. BlueGold

David Young

Health’n’safety everywhere — except in the banking system

‘The President tells me that too much regulation is harming business,’ Margaret Thatcher said, the moment I walked into her office for my weekly meeting. I had been appointed minister without portfolio some months earlier and the Prime Minister had just returned overnight from her latest summit with Ronald Reagan. ‘You had better believe it,’ was my somewhat flippant reply — and for my pains I found myself minutes later with my own cabinet sub-committee on deregulation. This was the beginning of years of deregulation efforts by successive governments, which gradually faded until today, when all that remains is in the name of the department for ‘Business, Enterprise & Regulatory

Rebecca Newman

Galapagos Notebook

Did you know that marine iguanas have two penises? That the temperature at which their eggs incubate determines the gender of a giant tortoise? That a female parrotfish can change into a male? Two weeks in the Galapagos and I’ve climbed volcanoes, swum with penguins, and worn out my shutter-finger photographing sea lion pups. I’ve also become a mound of wildlife trivia. It’s Darwin’s fault, of course. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, I took a berth on a latterday version of The Beagle to retrace the great man’s steps. Crippled by seasickness for most of his voyage, Darwin wrote: ‘I loathe, abhor the sea

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Hope We Better Believe In?

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during afternoon trading February 10, 2009 in New York City. MarkMarkets were down nearly 400 points after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner detailed the administrations plans to battle the financial crisis. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) Last year you couldn’t open a newspaper without seeing photographs of Distressed Traders wondering what to do now that their world was collapsing. But times change and the media craves novelty. So now we get Confused Traders instead. This seems reasonable. After all, here’s Paul Krugman: An old joke from my younger days: What do you get when you cross a Godfather with a

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Are they trying to teach Gordon how to say sorry?

The apologies, however hedged, from the disgraced bankers at today’s Treasury Select Committee hearing, highlighted that there has been no apology from the Prime Minister for his role in all this. Indeed, Brown’s consistent refusal to acknowledge his errors has diminished whatever was left of his Prime Ministerial authority. Just remember that Today Programme interview where Brown claimed that, with the benefit of hindsight, the one thing he wished he’d done differently was keep a closer eye on the American sub-prime market. But Martin Bright reports that Downing Street is considering a change of tack: “word reaches The Bright Stuff that the man who has never knowingly apologised for anything

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Only three Republicans vote for the stimulus in the Senate

The stimulus has passed the Senate and now heads to a conference to iron out the differences between the House and Senate versions. However, the bill only got three Republican votes meaning that it passed 61-37, only avoiding the threat of being filibustered by one vote. Back at the beginning of January, the Obama team were talking about getting 80 votes for the package in the Senate. The latest polling suggest that Obama is having the better of the public opinion fight over the stimulus. But there must be worry in the Obama camp that they are into partisan warfare so early on in the presidency. This means that they

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Israeli elections: Kadima set to be the largest party but Netanyahu appears more likely to be able to form a government

The exit polls all suggest that Kadima will, by a small margin, win the most seats in the Knesset. However, with Likud coming a close second and Labor appearing to have been forced into fourth by the unsavoury Yisrael Beitenu party of Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu appears to have a better chance of forming a government. But remember these are exit polls and so much could change. Also, the course of coalition negotiations are notoriously hard to predict. Exit poll projections: Channel 1: Kadima 30 Likud 28 Yisrael Beitenu  14 Labor 13 Channel 2: Kadima 29 Likud 27 Yisrael Beitenu 15 Labor 13 Channel 10: Kadima 30 Likud 28 Yisrael Beitenu

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Libertarian Tail

This is the funniest line I’ve read today: Fifty per cent of the libertarians would agree to surgery giving them a prosthetic tail if they were paid enough to do so. Come on, you know you’d say yes too if the price were right…

Daniel Korski

A clenched fist no more?

Last night, President Obama said he will be looking for “openings” in coming months that could lead to “face-to-face” talks with Tehran. “I think that there’s the possibility, at least, of a relationship of mutual respect and progress”. But despite Obama’s repeated offers of a new kind of relationship, Iran has usually responded with the same clenched fist that it has waved at successive US administrations. For the Tehran regime, anti-Americanism is a cornerstone of their survival strategy. If they unclench their fists, the Iranian government will no longer be able to blame foreigners for the country’s dire economic condition. With the oil price tumbling, Iran’s economy is going to

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The meritocracy of <em>Mad Men</em>

The second season of Mad Men launches tonight on BBC4 (and, more sumptuously still, on BBC HD). Today’s Times has a timely interview with both Mary Wells Lawrence and Charlotte Beers, both two legendary Mad Women in their day. Wells Lawrence is fairly disdainful of the series – not only are the people not rich enough, she says, but it needn’t really be about advertising at all: “It’s just a narrative about people – you could have set it in a hedge fund.” She has a point. There are some inaccuracies and fanciful inventions, not least of them being the title, a phrase I had never before heard in twenty

James Forsyth James Forsyth

A sign of the times: Salter standing down

News reaches Coffee House that Martin Salter, Labour MP for Reading West, is standing down at the next election. Salter’s seat is, according to UK Polling Report, the 107th Tory target and thus a seat the Tories need to win to have an overall majority in the Commons. PS Salter standing down was not expected. Indeed, he rebelled for the first time since Brown became PM in the recent third runway vote. 

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The bankers should learn from Profumo

Watching the bankers’ appearance before the Treasury Select Committee today, it struck me that it is going to take more than an apology that is rapidly hedged as the proceedings go on to assuage public anger. These bankers have become fantastically rich from doing their jobs in a way that led to their banks being dashed against the rocks when the current storm blew in and people who earn far less money than them now find their taxes being used to bailout and prop up the institutions that these men were so handsomely rewarded for running. Sir Fred Goodwin may protest that he has personally lost £5 million, but his own standard

Lisa Hilton

Fearful of the Wetlands?

Literary news this week suggests that when it comes to women writing about sex, reviewers are still reacting in the same way as Dr Johnson to his walking dog, surprised that it’s being done at all. So hats off to Charlotte Roche, who has managed to give both the Sunday Times and the Guardian the willies by cheerfully confessing to consuming pornography with her husband and starting her book Wetlands with a graphic discussion of hemorrhoids. Male reviewers seem barely to have moved on from the mentality of the Chatterley trial: anything which disturbs or shocks them must be dismissed as pornography. Thus Rod Liddle (who presumably wouldn’t want his

Peter Hoskin

Will Brown get hit by the banking shrapnel?

So far as Brown is concerned, the biggest problem with this grilling of the bankers is that it will rebound, dangerously, on to him.  Despite the Government’s best efforts to pass the buck (see Alistair Darling’s article in the Indy today), there’s plenty of room for them to be embarrassed by the associations, friendships and working partnerships that the Treasury Select Committee is shining a light on.  The ever-alert Paul Waugh points out one of them over on his blog: Yet today’s news from the Treasury Select Committee is the most damaging threat of all of to Mr Brown and Mr Darling’s judgement in relying on Sir James [Crosby, former chief exec of HBOS

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Perils of Weighing In

Newsweek, facing declining sales and losing money and advertisers, has decided to move away from it’s wrestling match with TIME and try and be a gutsier, more opinionated, less-soporific enterprise. This is pretty daring stuff, really. This is part of it: “There’s a phrase in the culture, ‘we need to take note of,’ ‘we need to weigh in on,’ ” said Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham. “That’s going away. If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.” This is sensible: one of the problems the news weeklies face is that they’re terribly

Peter Hoskin

Bonfire of the vanities

The Treasury Select Committee’s evidence session with the bankers (which you can watch live here) makes for great soap opera.  We’ve had contrition, grim confessions, audacious defences, and denial after denial after denial.  John McFall kicked off the whole thing saying that he wants to discover “what went wrong”.  For me, it brought to mind Paul Myner’s claim, last October, that no-one – not even the Government – can escape blame for the situation.  Just imagine if everyone – Gordon Brown, Alan Greenspan, the professional speculators and, yes, the bankers – were being forced in front of the cameras.  Now that would be a bonfire to behold.

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Obama’s Idea of Bipartisanship

Noam Scheiber addresses complaints that Obama is too conciliatory, too keen on the idea of bipartisanhip for bipartisanship’s sake: But complaints like this miss what’s been accomplished these last few weeks: Obama has completely defined the stimulus narrative on his own terms. To the average voter, Obama has been earnest and conciliatory while the Republicans have been cynical, self-serving, and puerile. Which, if the past is any guide, is precisely the moment he’ll start playing hardball. I think this is true. Political junkies enjoy partisanship, not least because it permits one to divide the world neatly into Good Guys and Rotten Eggs, but much of the public, especially in times

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The bankers say sorry

The four bank execs summoned by the Treasury Select Committee hearing have apologised. Although, I suspect that the impact of their apologies has been rather undermined by Sir Fred Goodwin claiming that big bonuses were a ‘source of angst’ for British banks!  

Peter Hoskin

Poll-wise, it’s starting to look like summer 2008 again

A poll to delight the Tories in today’s Times.  The Populus effort has them on 42 percent (down 1 percentage point on last month); Labour on 28 percent (down 5); and the Lib Dems on 19 percent (up 3).  That matches Labour’s total in two other recent polls, and suggests they’re starting to plumb similar depths to last summer.  Cameron now also leads on the question of which leader is best to deal with the recession, by 41-32 over Brown.  And he’s ahead, as normal, on taking Britain forward after the recession. Perhaps the most eyecatching finding, though, is the rise in support for the ‘Other’ parties such as UKIP

Monday

Peter Hoskin

The Balls forecast

Remember the general hoo-haa when Gordon Brown accidentally referred to a “global depression” in PMQs last week?  Well, now Ed Balls has surpassed His Master’s Slip-up, and by some distance.  Here’s what the Schools Minister told Labour’s Yorkshire conference at the weekend: “The economy is going to define our politics in Britain in the next year, the next five years, the next 10 and even the next 15 years. These are seismic events that are going to change the political landscape. I think that this is a financial crisis more extreme and more serious than that of the 1930s and we all remember how the politics of that era were