I ought to be a natural Warren Buffett. I’ve never had any difficulty doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. If there ever was anyone capable of being ‘fearful when everyone else is greedy and greedy when everyone else is fearful’, it’s me. Why, then, is Warren Buffett worth tens of billions and
Financial crisis has transformed Robert Peston from egghead to celebrity, says Dominic Midgley, but the BBC business editor indignantly denies he’s a government mouthpiece The cover of the hardback version of Who Runs Britain?, Robert Peston’s masterly dissection of how the global economy got into the mess it’s in today, features an abstract version of
Moderation has never been popular in Shanghai. Over the years the city has been home to many types of excess, from opium and sing-song girls to Red Guards. At the moment the favourite is construction, and its partner, destruction. One of the newest and boldest examples of the immoderate is the Shanghai World Financial Center.
In 2003, during a long night of swilling fine French wines in Beijing, talk turned to China’s rising economic fortunes. Old China hands at the table reminisced about camel trains clattering through the capital’s dim 1970s streets. Then a mysterious American chipped in with an extraordinary tale. Back in 1983, he said, China’s coffers were
Moderation has never been popular in Shanghai. Over the years the city has been home to many types of excess, from opium and sing-song girls to Red Guards. At the moment the favourite is construction, and its partner, destruction. One of the newest and boldest examples of the immoderate is the Shanghai World Financial Center.
The real economy has taken only the first step towards recession but the housing market has already clocked up four successive quarters of negative growth. Indeed, house prices have now fallen further in 13 months, according to the Halifax, than they plunged in the whole three years of the 1989-91 crash. And like the rest
A little over a year ago, when it was already obvious to virtually everybody that the boom was over, the City’s Panglossian crowd came up with one last, seemingly profound, argument to allow them to continue to deny reality. Going by the ugly name of ‘decoupling’, the theory was that the emerging economies were no
V.S. Naipaul, that clever and often wise man, once laid down: ‘One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.’ Well, where’s the comedy now? There is certainly plenty of hysteria. Old Theodore Roosevelt used to say: ‘Men are seldom more unreasonable than when they lose their money. They do not seek to apportion
In times of anxiety, I always turn to Jane Austen’s novels for tranquil distraction. Not that Jane was unfamiliar with financial crises and banking failures. On the contrary: she knew all about them from personal experience. As a young girl she seems to have regarded bankers as rather glamorous figures. In Lady Susan, written when
‘Whenever there’s a catastrophe on Wall Street, our business just gets better — because our products become more collectable.’ So says Bob Kerstein, founder of Virginia-based Scripophily.com, the world’s largest buyer and seller of historic bonds and share certificates. The recent blizzard of insurance and investment banking failures has brought Kerstein particularly brisk business. ‘Our
Number 35, St Andrew Square in the heart of Edinburgh’s New Town has no name plate or corporate signage. It is an anonymous executive office used by Sir Fred Goodwin, Royal Bank of Scotland’s now-departing chief executive, for discreet meetings away from the bank’s out-of-town campus headquarters at Gogarburn. From its elegant Georgian first- floor
Kim Schlunke would like you to buy a flying saucer. No, honestly, he’s got a video of it on his mobile, showing one buzzing round his lab in Perth, Australia. See it fly! See it hover! See it land delicately on its little legs! It looks, in other words, like a special effect of the
The ticking parcel I failed to spot and the oil-price prediction I got spot on Last week’s global stock market panic, the overture to this week’s astonishing round of state interventions, was in part provoked by fear of humongous losses in something called ‘credit default swaps’. These arcane inventions by Wall Street rocket-scientists are a
To anyone born before 1980, the idea that the state would own a large part of the economy was normal. The ‘mixed economy’ was a typically British compromise between American cut-throat capitalism and the incompetent communism beyond the Iron Curtain — or at least a compromise between the socialist leanings of the Labour Left and
My attitude to money is simple. I want to think about it as little as possible. So I have arranged my life with this end in view. I work hard and spend less than I earn. I put aside sums for tax and VAT and do the returns promptly. I pay bills by return of
All old Africa hands have a story of their narrow escape from charging elephants to tell. I have one myself, but I know from experience that such stories are usually more interesting to the teller than to the told. They are not quite as bad as big game hunting stories, however: they are the real
Ross Clark says speculators and fraudsters saw easy money in buying city-centre flats with borrowed money — but investors and lenders now face huge losses as prices crash I have developed a rather ghoulish pastime. It involves thumbing through auction results for repossessed apartments in city centres, then checking what those same properties sold for
When the credit crunch first hit, Icelanders blamed everyone but themselves: international banks for their loss of faith, hedge-funders in London for betting on the country going bankrupt. Seven months later, though, with its current troubles and the recent central bank rescue of Glitnir, Iceland’s third largest bank, the mood is one of anger amid
Ross Clark takes a look at the TaxPayers’ Alliance Seldom has tax featured in the media over the past decade without the lanky figure of Robert Chote of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, or his predecessor Andrew Dilnot, popping up to discuss it. Yet recently the IFS’s monopoly has come under increasingly serious challenge. Whether
Just as directors’ dealings often reveal more about the immediate outlook for their companies’ shares than can be gleaned from annual reports, it often makes sense to follow what fund managers do, rather than what they say. So it was a pleasant surprise over lunch the other day to find myself in step with one