Martin Vander Weyer

‘Fury at the City slickers betting against UK plc,’ shouted the Daily Mail on Tuesday, after Monday’s mayhem saw the pound hit an all-time low of $1.03. A more accurate corporate metaphor, though less punchy as headline material, would have been something like this… Activist mavericks seize boardroom control of giant sluggish utility. Novice finance

Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng – keen to sharpen the City’s competitive edge, we’re told – wants to remove the legislative cap, imported from Brussels in 2014, that limits bankers’ bonuses to 100 per cent of their base salary, or up to 200 per cent with shareholder approval. That raises interesting questions. Was the cap a good

At His Majesty’s Treasury, it’s all looking a bit like Year Zero in revolutionary Cambodia. Kwasi Kwarteng’s first act was to sack the respected but ‘orthodox’ permanent secretary Sir Tom Scholar. Now the FT reports the Chancellor ordering underlings to focus ‘entirely on growth’, presumably at the expense of financial discipline. I’m picturing a locked

My predecessor Christopher Fildes looked at exchange rates through a cocktail glass: three negronis for the Italian lira equivalent of a tenner, good; a $2 martini for £1, even better. That latter ratio applied briefly 30 years ago when, he wrote, the favoured tipple ‘brushed against my lips like an angel’s kiss’. It recurred during

How outraged should we be that Saudi Aramco has reported a world-record quarterly profit of $48 billion, representing a giant bonus from the global oil price spike provoked by the war in Ukraine? Well, that’s how the cookie crumbles when you’re sitting on oil reserves so abundant and so easily accessible that your marginal cost

We’ll find out shortly whether official statistics agree with economists surveyed by Bloomberg who say UK GDP probably shrank by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter. But at an uncomfortable moment when we know things can only get worse, looking backwards doesn’t help and nor does holding out hope for a miraculous ‘emergency budget’

‘What’s worse, they’re paying the profits to shareholders,’ said a grey-haired woman ahead of me in the Co-op queue. ‘Bloody shareholders,’ her friend of similar age and class spat back. I guessed they were talking about Centrica, parent of British Gas, which at a time when domestic energy bills are rising 23 times faster than

The government’s ‘cost-of-living tsar’, Just Eat co-founder David Buttress, was appointed last month as a Canutian gesture against the inflation tide. He says his role is to encourage retailers and utilities to offer discount deals that might relieve short-term pain for consumers. But wouldn’t it be good if he also had powers to shame companies

‘Black swan’ theory, developed by the writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb, refers to unexpected events that have extreme consequences but are rationalised afterwards by pundits who say ‘That was always going to happen.’ Covid was a big one; Putin’s war on Ukraine another. It’s in the nature of global events that there’s always a dark-feathered disruptor

Is anything anywhere getting noticeably better – economically speaking – or at least less bad? Are commodities and manufactured goods beginning to move more freely, for example, to ease the demand pressures that are stoking inflation? It’s good news that the number of container ships anchored off Los Angeles-Long Beach waiting to unload has fallen

Here I go again, in my occasional role as your intrepid transport correspondent. Last week I reported on airport chaos, last month on the opening of the Elizabeth line. Now here I am boldly defying the rail strike on a Grand Central train from York to King’s Cross. To be honest, on a perfect sunny

Stock markets are tumbling, but given the tide of economic news, that’s hardly surprising. The S&P 500 index dived into bear market territory – 20 per cent down since January – after a rise in US inflation for May. Our own FTSE indices reacted badly to an unexpected 0.3 per cent drop in UK GDP