Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
Water, water everywhere in the media this week, as the Thames Water utility – crippled by debt and shamed by Niagaras of raw sewage – reached the brink of collapse. Anticipating government intervention if Thames’s owners cannot inject sufficient new equity, pundits decried the 1989 privatisation of English and Welsh water – which passed from
As the Wagner convoy rumbled northwards towards Moscow on Saturday, markets braced for turmoil. What would armed uprising in Russia do to the supply and price of oil, gas, wheat or fertiliser? Would it provoke investor flights to gold or bitcoin? But when the episode fizzled out, Monday’s prices saw little more than upticks, with
How real is the ‘mortgage crisis’ and what, if anything, can be done to relieve it? BBC vox pops of borrowers whose monthly costs have already rocketed or who face imminent rate resets at 6 per cent or worse certainly give a dramatic impression. But in reality this is a slow-motion car-crash – for Rishi
‘Crypto assets are commodities,’ said my neighbour at dinner. No they’re not, I replied, commodities are natural raw materials that have ultimate real-world uses. Crypto is merely a collection of blips in cyberspace to which adherents choose to attribute value. ‘Just like fiat currencies,’ my neighbour shot back. ‘What’s real about them? Aren’t they just
I’d happily jump on the Telegraph bandwagon for the abolition of inheritance tax, even in the company of Liz Truss and Nigel Farage. The urge to provide a cushion of capital for children and grandchildren is an honourable one. Recipients of already-taxed cash from deceased relatives are arguably less likely to be burdens on the
Do you hate airport e-gates? Me too. The instructions are poor, the facial recognition frequently fails and the ‘Don’t abuse our staff’ posters tell you you’re trapped in a system that’s bound to annoy. Last Saturday it went from bad to worse, when all 270 e-gates at UK entry points stopped working. ‘A technical nationwide
Since we launched our Economic Innovator (originally ‘Disruptor’) awards in 2018, I’ve had enjoyable contacts with well over 100 entrepreneur-led high-growth companies picked as finalists from across the UK. Most I met at convivial pitching lunches; the rest told me their stories by Zoom or phone. Only one chosen finalist has ever shunned both the
So farewell, Transpennine Express, the northern rail operator whose hapless management were no match for the Aslef union that was determined to see this underperforming franchise renationalised. TPE’s drivers, beneficiaries of the super-luxury conditions I recited last month, have effectively invented a new form of moral hazard: have no fear of crippling your employer with
Should US regulators ban short-selling of bank stocks? That’s a hot topic as investors refuse to accept reassurance from the Fed chairman Jerome Powell that the recent banking crisis-that-wasn’t is over. Following JPMorgan’s rescue of First Republic, shares in other regional banks such as PacWest in Los Angeles, Western Alliance (Phoenix) and First Horizon (Memphis)
Is Britain really ‘closed for business’? That, we’re told, is the view of US ‘Big Tech’ as expressed by Activision Blizzard – the company whose most famous product is the violent videogame Call of Duty – in response to the blocking by the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of Activision’s proposed $70 billion merger
During a lull in the pandemic I rented a little flat in Oxford for the academic year I was thrilled to have been offered; then Covid came back, my college all but closed and I made so little use of my lodgings that it would have been cheaper per night to stay in a suite
‘March madness’ was a tag applied with hindsight to last month’s scare provoked by the unconnected collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse. Nothing systemic there, said the wise men. But this week began with another rumble, as reputable US institutions, including State Street of Boston and the stockbroker Charles Schwab, reported large deposit
Three months ago I praised Tony Danker, director general of the Confederation of British Industry, for berating the government over corporate tax rises and skill shortages: at last, I said, a CBI chief con brio. But now he’s been fired following an investigation into his ‘workplace conduct’ and three other CBI staffers have been suspended
BBC News reported Britain’s imminent accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership behind two stories about racism in cricket, giving no suggestion that it might represent a major economic breakthrough. Rather the opposite, with emphasison the cautious official prediction that CPTPP membership will add just 0.08 per cent to UK GDP over
When markets are in ‘seek and destroy’ mode, like the last dragon in Game of Thrones, it’s fruitless to guess where they might attack next. Silicon Valley Bank’s excess of deposits was not in itself a signal of distress. Credit Suisse’s balance sheet was stronger than those of many other leading European banks. Deutsche Bank
If G-SIBs were a gentlemen’s club rather than a category invented by the Basel-based Financial Stability Board, Credit Suisse would have been kicked down the front steps months ago. G-SIBs are the 30 ‘global systemically important banks’ and even within that list, Credit Suisse counted among those with the lowest ‘required levels of addition capital
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
