It was unfashionable of me to write in praise of George Osborne on Budget day. I did so, you may recall, because ‘at least we have a finance minister who’s always on the front foot’: I wanted to make a contrast between our Chancellor’s relentless activism in pursuit of his political goals, and the supine
In every gathering, someone — often me — calls for a show of hands on Brexit. And I have to report that, in the varied circles in which I move, ‘leave’ may have the best tunes but isn’t winning the argument. At a Mayfair fundraiser for a Jewish charity, the crowd of mostly thirty-to-fortysomething men
Give thanks for George Osborne — and I don’t say that because I happen to be writing this column on a slow train from Leeds to Manchester, a line that this Chancellor has just promised, for the umpteenth time, to upgrade. I say it because whatever flaws and gimmicks may have leapt out of Wednesday’s
All in all, this is an odd moment for an outburst of high spirits: not from me — I’m as phlegmatic as ever — but from commodity investors. The price of a barrel of oil has rallied from $27 to $40 after talks between Saudi Arabia and Russia about restricting supply; one pundit called that
The London Stock Exchange is no longer the red-hot crucible it once was, given the multifarious ways by which shares, bonds and derivatives now change hands. But the prospect of the LSE passing into the control of Deutsche Börse — in what was announced as a ‘merger of equals’, but with the Germans holding the
‘The City is in no doubt that staying in Europe is the only way ahead,’ declared Mark Boleat for the City of London Corporation. Likewise Chris Cummings of the lobby group TheCityUK praised David Cameron for delivering ‘a really special deal’. The official Square Mile is squarely for ‘remain’, confident that the Prime Minister has
All this talk of a new financial apocalypse, so soon after the last one, is starting to annoy me. Partly because investors as a crowd are so irrational; -partly because so much that governments and central banks have done to contribute to the current market mayhem seems to work against the sensible efforts of ordinary
Upbeat or downbeat? I asked last month whether the mood where you live is energised by enterprise or demoralised by public-sector retreat — or both. Replies poured in while the news mostly got worse. Governor Carney warned that ‘the UK cannot help but be affected by an unforgiving global environment and sustained financial market turbulence’
Amid all the turmoil in global energy markets, we should not lose sight of the UK power programme that we’re praying will keep our lights on a decade hence: it is, as you know, a hobbyhorse of mine. So how’s it going down at Hinkley Point in Somerset? My man with big binoculars in the
Like Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant, we’ve just been savaged by a bear but we’ll probably survive. Leading UK-listed stocks have fallen 20 per cent from last April’s peak after a six-year climb, and the FTSE100 chart has taken on a saw-toothed downward trajectory that suggests, to those who rely on such indicators, that there
‘Who’s to blame for financial crisis’ is a poem I wrote in 2012, rhyming ‘speculators, spivs and traders’ with ‘rich, -uncaring hedge-fund raiders’, while taking passing swipes at Gordon Brown and ‘Mervyn King, who really didn’t do a thing’. But it’s too early in 2016 to update my ditty, because the new crisis — if
Should anyone take investment advice from Royal Bank of Scotland, the institution which so misread markets before the crash that it required the biggest taxpayer bailout in banking history? Possibly not, but a bulletin from RBS’s research team this week certainly caused a stir by declaring that ‘in a crowded hall, exit doors are small,
Was the Financial Conduct Authority leaned on by the Chancellor to scrap its ‘review of banking culture’? Or did it decide pragmatically that its resources would be better devoted to pursuing individual cases of cheating and criminality? I suspect the answer is a bit of both. Acting FCA chief Tracey McDermott — a no-nonsense northerner
Last year was a bumper year for mergers and acquisitions. Recovering prospects and relatively low price-earnings ratios made the takeover arena alluring: the global volume of deals looks certain to have passed the $4.3 trillion record of 2007. Among the new giants are Shell-BG, Heinz-Kraft, Pfizer-Allergan and monster brewer AB InBev-SAB Miller; bonuses reaped by London
I thought you might enjoy a little parable for Christmas, so here goes… The boardroom clock said twelve minutes to one. A waft of gravy in the air indicated that Christmas lunch awaited in an adjacent room. One agenda item to go: Colin the company secretary made a throat-cutting gesture to Kevin from health
The high street flopperoo that was ‘Black Friday’ may have something to do with terrorism fears, or even the downturn of the Chinese economy: in last year’s ugly scenes of bargain-hunters wrestling over televisions, Chinese tiger–shoppers seemed to win most of the spoils. But this year you could have held a picnic in the entrance
‘Everyone remembers the names of Applegarth of Northern Rock and Goodwin of RBS, but history may judge the HBOS men to have been the worst of the lot,’ I wrote four years ago. Judgment has arrived at last in a Bank of England report on the 2008 HBOS collapse — plus a second report, by
At Stormont on Saturday, we observed a minute’s silence for the dead of Paris. Our conference group of Brits and Americans had convened two days earlier to discuss conflict resolution, the idea that nationalism and tribalism are the enemies of peace and prosperity, and how all this might relate to the migration crisis; so the
Like the Christmas pudding sampled by Hercule Poirot at Kings Lacey — but six weeks early — our Spectator Money supplement contains a little treasure in every portion, and perhaps even a priceless gem. I particularly commend the essays by Warwick Lightfoot and Subitha Subramaniam on interest rates, and why central banks have become so
I confess to being an out-and-out Luddite when it comes to bitcoin and other so-called crypto-currencies. To the extent that I think about them at all, I think that they are an ephemeral by-product of those creepy ‘virtual worlds’ in which obsessed gamers eventually go mad; that only such lost souls could seriously believe unregulated
