As the absurdly coiffed and probably deranged Kim Jong-Il fingers his nuclear button, not even the ballsiest hedge fund manager would contemplate investing in the prospect of Korean reunification. But I could name one secretive London investor who took a big punt back in the 1980s, buying a bundle of North Korean government debt at
It was a day to remember: 20 years ago, on 27 October 1986, Big Bang caused a revolution in the securities market which turned the whole financial sector upside down. The early 1980s was a time of change. The Thatcher government’s thirst for deregulation was at its height. Exchange controls had been lifted, capital could
25 October 1986 My friend the stockjobber closed his book, turned his back on his pitch, and walked with me off the Stock Exchange floor, down Throgmorton Street and into Bill Bentley’s fish house. We raised our glasses of Montrachet to the last of the good old days. On Monday he must quit the floor
Amid the growing mutterings over his suitability to be prime minister, Gordon Brown has managed to preserve his reputation in at least one quarter. It has become received wisdom that the Chancellor played a blinder on his first day in the job in 1997 by making the Bank of England independent, giving us perpetually low
‘We men don’t want to wear condoms, we want the West to find a cure.’ This dilemma, faced by HIV counsellors at the Mildmay Centre near Entebbe, mirrors that experienced by those hoping to help Uganda financially. Mukasa, a handler at the chimpanzee sanctuary on Ngamba Island, 45 minutes from Entebbe by speedboat, gives me
The most valuable people on earth are those who can make you laugh. Laughter is the great restorative and rejuvenator. I’m surprised more philosophers have not written about it: only boring Bergson. In recent years the people who have made me laugh most — ‘shriek’, as Nancy Mitford called it — are Carla, Leonie and
If you get up early enough you might spy the solid frame of Allan Leighton running round one of the London parks before he pays a surprise visit to a Royal Mail delivery office. The reaction of the postmen and women is usually the same. ‘They always say, “Oh s***, it’s the chairman”,’ Leighton laughs.
‘Have you had an accident at work that’s led to a loss of income?’ ‘Would you like to consolidate your debt?’ ‘Do you want to release equity from your property?’ If you’ve ever had the misfortune to find yourself watching ITV1 during the daytime (according to the British Market Research Bureau, not a single Spectator
John Andrews says investing is like motoring: it’s not the vehicle that’s dangerous but the way it’s driven Dave wins millions on the lottery, and the first thing he does is sprint down to the nearest Ferrari showroom and jump into the latest model with extra-deep bass woofers and a little fold-down table for his
Ian Cowie says the simplest ways of avoiding inheritance tax are the best — especially when the law keeps changing If there is one thing worse than paying inheritance tax, it is discovering at the graveside that an expensive IHT-avoidance scheme has proved a waste of money, in addition to what you are going to
I have been following with interest — not to say glee — the spat between the government of Kazakhstan and ‘Borat Sagdiyev’, the latest alter ego of the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. Kazakhstan’s autocratic President Nursultan Nazarbayev has evidently failed to see the funny side of Borat’s characterisation of Kazakh men as brutal racists and
I can perfectly well understand why someone should be an agnostic. But to be an atheist — to deny flatly and without qualification the existence of God — is to me wholly unsympathetic. The depth of folly, indeed, and not without malice to us all. It makes little sense in reason. For if it is
If you happened to be scripting a James Bond movie and were looking for a role model for a fabulously sinister corporation, there can be little doubt where you would look for inspiration today. Gold no longer matters to the global economy, oil is running out, and old-style media magnates are too busy fretting about
Ever thought of investing in teddy bears? Before you collapse in a fit of laughter, consider the fortunate person who found a large Steiff teddy bear abandoned in a skip and took it to Christie’s, where it sold for over £7,000. Or the person who sold a Steiff ‘teddy girl’ to the Yoshihiro Sekiguchi Museum
Simon Nixon says the Conservatives should start saying a lot more about tax cuts and deregulation and a lot less about ‘work–life balance’ To see where business stands in the Conservative leadership’s current list of priorities, take a look at next week’s party conference agenda. The platform that used to proclaim the Thatcherite gospel of
The relationship between Britain and France, in business as in so many other things, seems always to have been built on incomprehension, or at least on very different points de vue. The two former great colonial powers are said to have built their empires on very different institutional models, for example: trading posts or comptoirs
Irwin Stelzer argues that in trade and finance, Anglo–US relations are surprisingly well balanced Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with America is not confined to foreign policy. In more ways than one, our economies are interconnected in special ways, with neither being the other’s ‘poodle’. Start with finance, where Britain seems set to be the dominant partner,
If you happen to be reading this on Friday evening, I invite you to picture me making merry at the Michaelmas Feast of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York, which is about to celebrate its 650th anniversary and of which I am a rather junior member. Our founders — mercers trading
My local supermarket in Moscow is, by any standards, a well-heeled place. It’s called the Alphabet of Taste, and its mission is to present its wealthy Moscow consumers with refined new ways of parting with their money. The deli counter offers more than 80 cheeses (including such exotica as Bûche d’Affinois and two sorts of
Rupert Steiner meets Bupa chief Val Gooding, one of Britain’s most successful female bosses A silhouette of a faceless giant hangs on Bupa’s atrium wall. The piece is bisected and has vaguely medical undertones, appropriate for the corporate offices of a private healthcare group. But the parallels do not stop there. Bupa has another almost