Uncertainty reigns among UK investors. Will this week’s Budget cuts wither the green shoots of growth? Whatever happened to safety in blue chips when BP’s dividends can vanish into an oil slick? Where’s a stock-picker to turn? If the words ‘small cap’ don’t send you rigid with fright, then there are good reasons to look
Alex Brummer says blue chip stocks that pay a handsome stream of dividends are — usually — a reliable bet First, I have a serious confession to make. For as long as I can remember, my informal advice to any UK investor considering a share purchase — particularly during the volatile years of the ‘great
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I wrote here in February that I did not believe the Conservatives’ pretence of having ‘absolutely no plans to increase VAT’, and that, having examined this fiercely complex issue at some length with an ice pack on my head, I had come down in favour of a VAT rise
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Santander is a port in northern Spain with a population the size of Swindon’s. It is also the eurozone’s largest banking group, an institution that has far outgrown its origins to become the owner, in Britain, of Abbey, Alliance & Leicester and the branch network of the crippled Bradford
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I’m baffled why anyone should be offended by the £275,000 salary paid to John Fingleton, the director of the Office of Fair Trading who was declared last week to be Britain’s highest-paid public servant. Even if Fingleton’s wad represents double the prime minister’s, it is barely more than one
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business ‘Does anyone remember David Laws?’ a former City colleague asked me during the brief interlude between the Lib Dem MP’s debut as financial secretary last Monday and his descent into hell on Friday. Judging by the sketchy accounts of his banking career in the weekend papers, with their references
The British trade union movement needs to get a grip on itself. The British trade union movement needs to get a grip on itself. These days, the public associates the brotherhood of organised labour chiefly with the bizarre antics of the highly politicised Unite union, with its warring and tweeting joint general secretaries and its
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Hedge funds can be accused of many different sins, not least because they operate in many different shapes and forms across the investment universe. As a label, ‘hedge fund’ is so loosely generic that generalising about the sector is almost as pointless as trying to corral it with tighter
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business ‘Why do we care what the markets think?’ asked the comedian Jeremy Hardy on Radio 4’s News Quiz last Friday. Whingeing leftie though he may be, Hardy had a point. ‘The markets’ were identified by spokesmen of all three political parties as the invisible presence at their secret post-election
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business The downside of globalisation is contagion. That was the lesson of the Icelandic ash that damaged the livelihoods of Kenyan rose-growers, and it’s the lesson of this week’s Greek bailout. The deal that will see Greece’s euro partners stump up E80 billion, plus E30 billion from the IMF, touches
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I’ve come up with a slogan to revive flagging Conservative canvassers — and an encouraging report from the doorsteps. My man in the housing estates of suburban York, of which I wrote two weeks ago, told me ‘the Labour vote is collapsing’ two days before reporters started using that
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business There’s a distinct whiff of unfinished business about the current assault on Goldman Sachs, which stands accused of fraud by the US Securities & Exchange Commission and of ‘moral bankruptcy’ by Gordon Brown — you know, that Scottish bloke who sometimes stands on platforms quite close to Nick Clegg.
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Bored by the election already? If you want to avoid it completely, I suggest a three-week holiday in scenic Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, where the national dish is boiled horse, the national pastime is bride-kidnapping, and they still change governments the old-fashioned way, with a little help from their
It is all very well saying Asia is replacing Europe as the prime creator of wealth, but is there any evidence that new superpowers like China and India will be able to supply the cultural magnificence which once accompanied European productivity? We take European art for granted. But its profusion and variety, and the thoroughness
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Bob Diamond, the generously remunerated American president of Barclays, has been put through his paces so often in this column that we really ought to give him his own treadmill in the Any Other Business penthouse gym. But I make no apology for mentioning him again — and this
Curious choice of words Gordon Brown used to describe himself when firing the starting gun for the general election. ‘I come from an ordinary middle-class family,’ he said. Until recently, ‘ordinary’ was used by Labour politicians as a euphemism for ‘working class’ and was often a way of differentiating themselves from their Conservative opponents who
So Anna Nicole Smith — the poor, talentless Texan girl who by virtue of the most enormous bosom became a stripper in a Houston clip joint and married one of its regular customers, a wheelchair-bound oil billionaire 63 years her senior — is to be the subject of a new opera that will receive its
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business It’s never easy to know what the Mayor of London really thinks — as many of us at The Spectator can attest from weekly experience during his benignly idiosyncratic editorship. His opposition to a third runway at Heathrow, and his espousal of an apparently fantastical alternative scheme to move
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Who’s the Manchurian candidate? That’s what I want to know. Even Tony Woodley, the hatchet-chinned joint general secretary of the Unite union, who has pursued a decade-long mission to cripple the competitiveness of the British airline industry, must realise that the timing of the BA cabin-crew strike is catastrophic
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business No sooner do I confess (6 March) to having dabbled in the dark art of off-balance-sheet finance, than along comes an official report into the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street firm led by the monstrous Dick Fuld, that reveals the mother of all financial disappearing tricks.