Banking

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 hesitant to raise them. In recent days we’ve had an indication from Mark Carney of the Bank of England that UK rates will stay at their current low well into next year, maybe until 2017; in the US, strong job numbers have pumped expectations that the first rate rise for nine years will be delivered

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 online money might eventually supplant the state-backed real thing; and that fashionable belief in them can only lead to fraud and loss. In short, I concluded some time ago, they are probably the work of Satan. ‘Every normal person above the age of six and not over-affected by chemical stimulants should [grasp] that societal concepts

I’m not a customer of TalkTalk, the phone company which revealed last week that a hacker had potentially compromised the personal data of four million users. But I feel I’m on the front line of the cyberwar nevertheless. In August, someone unknown to me tried to spend £1,200 at House of Fraser on my credit card account. The bank, to its credit, sniffed a fraud, rejected the transaction, cancelled the card and invited me to speak to a nice young man in India who talked me through the corrective procedure, including deleting a false email address inserted by the fraudster and setting up a new password to add extra security

Fourteen years is a long stretch. The punishment imposed on former UBS and Citigroup trader Tom Hayes for his role as ‘the hub of the conspiracy’ to rig yen Libor rates is the same as the maximum sentence for burglary with intent to commit GBH. Even though no public attempt has been made to quantify his fraudulent profits or identify victims, Hayes’s punishment is twice that imposed on rogue trader Kweko Adeboli, who lost UBS $2.3 billion — both having pleaded ‘not guilty’. With remission, Hayes will serve about half the term: Adeboli, jailed in late 2012, came out this June. But even so, the socially awkward Hayes has forfeited

A City insider at last month’s Mansion House dinner told me the Financial Conduct Authority had become ‘a bit of an embarrassment’ — or rather, that was my bowdlerisation of what he actually whispered. So it comes as no surprise that FCA chief executive Martin Wheatley has resigned, having been told by the Chancellor that his contract would not be renewed. A former London Stock Exchange director and Hong Kong securities regulator, Wheatley has a knack of making enemies: Hong Kong investors, unhappy with his handling of alleged misselling of Lehman Brothers ‘minibonds’, once burned a funeral effigy of him outside his office. London bankers didn’t quite go that far,

Last week’s deadline did not allow me to report from ringside at the Mansion House dinner, but there was so much to observe that I hope you’ll forgive a late dispatch. What a vivid guide to City psychology and precedence it offered. In the anteroom, Lord (Jim) O’Neill, the Treasury’s new Northern Powerhouse minister, could be seen chatting to ex-BP chief Tony Hayward, now chairman of mining giant Glencore Xstrata. At the top table, HSBC chairman Douglas Flint was carefully separated (by António Horta-Osório of Lloyds) from Governor Carney, so they could avoid discussing HSBC’s plans to move back to Hong Kong. But in prime place next to George Osborne

‘How do you feel when you go back to Gary?’ I ask Joe Stiglitz. ‘Well, frankly, I get depressed,’ he replies. ‘The American middle class was created in places like my home town and is now struggling badly — which makes me sad.’ Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning economist and the closest thing the left has to an intellectual superstar, grew up in Gary, Indiana, during the 1950s, when it was the heart of the booming US steel industry. His father sold insurance and his mother was a teacher. ‘We had a modest detached brick house, with a lawn all around — it was safe and secure,’ he recalls. ‘Back then,

If Ikea were a constituency, it would be a three-way marginal. That was my thought one morning last week as I walked a mile and a half round the Batley branch of the great Swedish retailer behind two keen shoppers (one wearing a pedometer) whom I had driven there as a birthday treat. Here are middle-aged parents buying nursery stuff for pregnant daughters, engaged couples fitting out first flats, Polish families bickering over bargain kitchenware, Muslim housewives chattering behind niqab facemasks, and even what I thought might be a transsexual under a blond beehive. There’s a Scandinavian sense of equality: no fast track through the labyrinth, no exclusive luxury floor.

The interesting thing about Labour’s pledge to abolish non-dom tax status — a squib designed to trap Tories into expressing sympathy for the rich, in the knowledge on the part of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls that it might cause loss of tax revenues and inward investment — is that it has been welcomed by influential voices in the City. The Eds must be astonished to find Sir Roger Carr, chairman of BAE Systems and former deputy chairman of the Bank of England, bang on message: he told the FT that non-dom rules are ‘a relic of the past that unfairly favours the few at the expense of the many’.

The FTSE100 index has at last breached 7,000, surpassing its peak of 30 December 1999 and provoking moderate celebration among investors who have enjoyed such poor returns all these years. A thousand pounds invested in FTSE100 stocks on Millennium Eve, with dividends reinvested, was worth £1,670 by last month, an annual return of 3.4 per cent compared to inflation over the period of around 2.9 per cent. The same sum invested in a London house would have been worth £3,200, nearly twice the return on shares if we ignore running costs and the leverage effect of mortgage borrowing; invested on the rollercoaster of gold bullion, it would have been worth

Of all the measures talked up ahead of the Budget, the reannouncement of a ‘radical’ review of the business rates was the least concrete in content but the most important in potential impact on the domestic economy, and especially on business investment. This column has banged on for years about the iniquity of a system that imposes the highest local taxes on businesses of any EU country, based on pre-crash rental assessments and bearing no relation to the value of diminishing local authority services. It’s a system that, on top of other economic woes, has brought devastation to town centres — and gets away with all this because it has

In my Yorkshire town of Helmsley the NatWest branch, originally an outpost of Beckett & Co of Leeds, has closed down — collateral damage of its crippled parent RBS’s continuing struggle for viability. Our branch of the Australian-owned Yorkshire Bank, descendant of the West Riding Penny Savings institution, became an antique shop some time ago. HSBC, formerly Midland, is now a hairdressing salon. When they arrived a century ago, all three were ‘challenger banks’ of their day. But now they have gone, no challengers have ridden in to replace them — unless we count Handelsbanken, the progressively old-fashioned Swedish retail bank that has a thriving franchise down the road at

One day you’re an elder statesman, chairing top committees and pontificating on Question Time, and the next you’re out in the cold, reading terrible headlines about yourself in the newspapers you’re trying to sleep under on a park bench. Well, perhaps not as bad as that — but as it is for former foreign secretaries, so it is for overseas bankers. Standard Chartered chief executive Peter Sands, I wrote in 2012, was ‘one of the few British bankers whose reputation has actually risen in recent years’; his bank was a ‘dull old dog’, but it was also steadily profitable and sensibly managed. Then came sanctions-busting scandal, unwise expansion, slipping profits