Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business ‘I don’t want to be treated like a criminal,’ a senior Barclays trader told me recently, in a slightly menacing European accent. That gives you a clue that he was not Bob Diamond, the bank’s American president, or John Varley, its very English chief executive, who have both foregone
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I was sorry to hear Gillian Tett, the FT’s fragrant financial commentator, calling the eurozone’s southern members ‘pigs’ last week. In sunnier times, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain were referred to collectively as ‘Club Med’, but lately the acronym of their initial letters has come into common usage, with
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Will I join the ticker-tape parade to welcome back Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and Congressman Henry B. Steagall of Alabama? Well, I might lurk in the crowd, but I certainly won’t be cheering. These venerable legislators sponsored the US Banking Act of 1933 which built a wall between
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business When I first met the former Bank of England governor Gordon Richardson, at a bankers’ jamboree in Japan, I remember thinking that he was smaller than I had imagined. So I was not surprised to read Sir Win Bischoff — long ago Richardson’s junior at Schroders and now chairman
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business If you don’t follow hospitality-trade news closely, you could be forgiven for thinking of Mitchells & Butlers as a Midlands-based brewery notable for its handsome Edwardian pubs. But it has not been that for decades, and if it was once an icon of progress in the beer trade, its
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business The winter is arctic and the economy is a long way from spring, but commodities are hot again. Gold, the doomsters’ favourite, has a charmed life of its own, though its recent ascent has run out of oomph. Copper, the metal of choice for professionals betting on global recovery,
It hardly came as a surprise that there were no knighthoods for bankers in the New Year honours list, and that even the blameless Lord Mayor of London, Ian Luder, received only a CBE, leaving him the first City alderman without a handle for 55 years — apparently as punishment for having spoken in favour
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business It’s tempting to label the Noughties ‘the decade to forget’, except that we only get about eight decades each, so it doesn’t really seem wise to forget any of them. It was certainly a decade of nasty shocks — 9/11, the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 — and of
Is there a banker in the house? Well, please don’t ask me to go on apologising for you If I have one last sentiment to offer for 2009 — apart, of course, from warm compliments of the season — it is that I’m bloody fed up of apologising for bankers. I’ve been thinking this since
Bankers are often accused of having such short memories that they are condemned to repeat the errors of their immediate predecessors, only more so. They would certainly need elephantine memories to remember a time when new banks, each with a distinctive mission and marketplace, were coming to life and flourishing everywhere. Indeed it was, in
I’ve always thought of fraud as a relatively attractive form of crime — not, of course, in the sense that I daydream of committing it, but in the sense that it involves intelligence, imagination and nerve, rather than violence and damage. I’ve always thought of fraud as a relatively attractive form of crime — not,
Go East, young man: if I was 25 again, this is where I’d try my luck Hong Kong Not four hours since the plane touched down at Chek Lap Kok and I’m howling ‘My Way’ into a Wanchai karaoke machine to the discomfort of my Chinese friends, who all sing like Charles Aznavour. I’ll give
I was Shriti’s speechwriter once upon a time — but she won’t need me in Seoul Several national newspapers lazily copied each other last week in describing me as ‘a former speechwriter to Shriti Vadera’ — the business minister who is leaving the government to become Gordon Brown’s emissary to the G20, and perhaps to
If, as the Westminster rumour mill suggests, business minister Baroness Shriti Vadera is about to resign from the Government, it is a far greater blow to the beleaguered prime minister than the loss of a PPS no one’s ever heard of over the Baroness Scotland affair, the potential loss of Lady Scotland herself, or even
Bourneville chocolate with Kraft cheese slices? Not a recipe I’d recommend The £10 billion bid for Cadbury by Kraft Foods, Inc of the US has provoked little protest — other than from the chocolate maker itself, which says it would rather remain a ‘pure-play confectionery business’ than become a component of Kraft’s ‘low-growth conglomerate’. The
Probably not, says Martin Vander Weyer, but the banks do need reining in. We’ll all be better off when the Tories dismantle Brown’s disastrous ‘tripartite’ regulatory system The last time I argued politics with Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, he was firmly on the centre right and I was a rather confused proto-Will-Hutton of the left.
Deep in the Dordogne, I can’t find a damned thing to be miserable about Sometimes in this job you feel you’re right in the thick of it, setting agendas, kicking butt, lobbing firecrackers into the national debate. Other times you might as well be some no-mates blogger in the middle of the night. Here I
Sir Fred’s return is one more sign that the storms are over — at least for now Of course it’s too early to declare an end to the economic crisis — who knows what storms the Gods have in store for us in the autumn, not to mention swine flu — but I think we
When the solemn temples are dissolving, why are they still offering giant salaries? I had the pleasure of giving a prize-giving speech on Saturday, at a lovely school called Fyling Hall which looks out over the North Sea near Whitby. I have developed a theme which seems to go down well on these occasions: treasure
I don’t give a toss about my MP’s flat, but I’m bloody livid about council tax Next Thursday’s elections have been so overwhelmed by the scandal of Westminster expenses that candidates for the major parties have scarcely shown their faces in my part of the world. And voters, content to fulminate at the daily pageant