Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
How is it possible for a bank to collapse because it holds too many customer deposits – rather than too few, or too many bad loans? That was the mystery of the sudden failure of Silicon Valley Bank, America’s 16th largest, which had seen its cash holdings double to almost $200 billion during the pandemic
Talk of a ‘stampede’ for the exit from the London Stock Exchange (LSE) may be overdone, but there’s clearly a problem. It was highlighted this week by the decisions of the Cambridge-based chip designer Arm to list in New York rather than London and of the Irish-based building supplies group CRH to shift its existing
The pound rose a cent or two against the dollar in response to the new trade deal for Northern Ireland. The FTSE 100 index rose on Monday but slid back on Tuesday, deterred by the prospect of a stronger pound, while the more domestic FTSE 250 showed a clearer uptrend. Overall, markets were cautiously positive about the
‘Greenwashing vs Sportswashing’, as Sky Sports put it, is a curious way to characterise the emerging £6 billion takeover tussle for Manchester United between industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani from Qatar. The latter might feel that his emirate – contrary to expectations, shall we say – has been not
‘Great news, Prime Minister, Astra-Zeneca has decided to site a new £320 million factory on Mersey-side. Your vision of the UK as a science superpower is becoming a reality.’ What a moment that would be for a Downing Street intern in search of the positive for an otherwise grim morning briefing; almost up there with
What comfort can we draw from the FTSE 100 Index’s all-time high of 7905 last Friday? Yes, in a limited sense, it’s a reason to be cheerful: first, because it’s a boost to the value of pension and tracker funds; second, because it fits the current narrative of gloom receding, in which inflation has probably
Does a change of chief executive at Unilever, the British-based shampoo-to-Marmite multinational, signal the demise of the fashion for corporate ‘purpose’? Alan Jope, who steps down in July, drew scorn when he declared that every brand in his portfolio should ‘stand for something more important than just making your hair shiny… or your food tastier’.
As a scattering of snow settles on the desolate site at Blyth in Northumberland that might have become the £3.8 billion Britishvolt battery factory, differences of opinion over the failure of this would-be flagship of the UK’s electric vehicle revolution become clearer. For Andrew Orlowski in the Daily Telegraph, it’s ‘a surprising success’, ministers having rightly
If you were rich, foreign and globally mobile, would you choose to move to the UK? The trend, it turns out, is the other way: according to migration consultants Henley & Partners, we’ve seen a net outflow of 12,000 millionaires since 2017, with 1,500 departures last year. And it’s pretty obvious why. If tax is
Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill had an unusually hard act to follow when he was appointed – after stints at Goldman Sachs, the European Central Bank and Harvard – to succeed the free-thinking Andy Haldane in 2021. Pill’s face is still not one most of us recognise, but he’s an interesting speechmaker and
How bad can it be? Predictions for 2023 have been universally miserable. Even if inflation and interest rates stop rising, there’s no pundit out there who believes consumers, homebuyers, investors or business owners will be cracking open the Mayerling brut rosé recommended below in 12 months’ time and saying: ‘Phew, that was tough but I
‘The purpose of corporations,’ writes William Magnuson, ‘is, and always has been, to promote the common good.’ That’s a very bold claim in an era when the left is convinced that shareholder-owned limited liability companies (which is what Magnuson means by corporations) largely exist to exploit the customer, the worker and the planet for the
65 min listen
Welcome to the special Christmas episode of The Edition! Up first: What a year in politics it has been. 2022 has seen five education secretaries, four chancellors, three prime ministers and two monarchs. But there is only one political team that can make sense of it all. The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson, deputy political editor Katy Balls
Half a century ago this week, I left school in Scotland and travelled to Worcester College, Oxford for an interview to read politics, philosophy and economics. I can still picture the trio of scary dons who quizzed me: the grumpy political historian ‘Copper’ LeMay; the deeply obscure philosopher Michael Hinton; and Dick Smethurst, a jovial
Will a price cap on Russian oil sales be a winning move in the Ukraine war? Since the invasion began, Russia has continued exporting crude and refined oil products at barely less than pre-war volumes and at rising prices that have replenished Putin’s coffers. From this week, however, the EU and G7 have imposed a
I can’t read ‘China rocked by protests’ and ‘Zero Covid could be the end of Xi Jinping’s rule’ without recalling 4 May 1989, when I watched chanting students march into Tiananmen Square and overheard the British ambassador Sir Alan Donald declare: ‘There, you see how liberal China is becoming.’ I was a banker back then
35 min listen
It’s fair to say that the tobacco industry is one of the most controversial ones out there, with the phrase ‘Big Tobacco’ almost a meme, a shorthand for unscrupulous business practices. No wonder then that tobacco companies are trying to remake themselves, companies like Philip Morris International. PMI has a history dating back to the
33 min listen
As Britons live longer and the population ages, society will soon have to rethink what it means to be of ‘working age’. Training and learning will have to be offered to older age groups who are healthier and more capable of work than their predecessors; while healthcare has room to improve in making sure that
A colourful selection of news items this week seem to have a central thread. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the Theranos fake blood-test venture once valued at $9 billion, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for fraud. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, the collapsed crypto exchange once valued at $32 billion, was holed up in
Note to self: don’t sound smug about the sudden collapse of FTX – the Bahamas-based crypto exchange whose valuation has been zapped from $32 billion to zero – because however much it plays to I-told-you-so instincts about the mug’s game of crypto, the episode may herald a wave of wealth destruction that’s the last thing the
