Matthew Lynn is a financial columnist and author of ‘Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis’ and ‘The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031’
The Cold War produced some of the great classics of British spy fiction. From the gadgets and babes with exotic Eastern European accents of the James Bond books, to the non-stop action of Alistair MacLean or the dark treachery of John Le Carré and the intricate office politics of Len Deighton, it served as the
The Standard & Poor’s headquarters, inside one of the biggest skyscrapers in New York’s financial district, houses just about every kind of brainiac that Wall Street money can buy. Mathematicians, computer modellers, economists and market strategists pooled their collective wisdom before making last Friday’s decision to strip the United States of its triple-A credit rating.
Josef Ackermann is something of a rarity in big business these days. Speculating last month on the possibility of a woman one day joining his board, the Deutsche Bank chief executive remarked that she might make it ‘more colourful and prettier’. Despite howls of outrage from the sisterhood — or the Schwesternschaft, as they are
Iceland is recovering from its financial shock – without the aid of a bank bailout It’s been a good week for the admittedly small band of people who get excited about the decisions made by central banks. In America, the Federal Reserve embarked on a second great round of printing money. In this country, the
This recession is a global ‘mancession’, says Matthew Lynn, with male-dominated industries collapsing and women getting a greater share of new jobs. But if work is turning into a female domain, what are we going to do with all the redundant men? Remember the feminist slogans of the 1970s? Phrases such as ‘A woman needs
The Greeks lied and cheated their way into the eurozone, says Matthew Lynn — and letting them get away with it through a bailout threatens the euro with collapse When Greece officially replaced the drachma with the euro on 1 January 2001, nobody was in the mood to mourn the world’s oldest currency. A public
Matthew Lynn marks the 20th anniversary of the peak of the Nikkei and asks whether we’ve learned any lessons Twenty years ago this month, as we’ve been reminded by countless documentaries, the Berlin Wall was coming down. Eastern Europe was convulsed by the revolutions from which communism never recovered. But much further east, something else
Matthew Lynn investigates the rise and rise of the family-run Spanish bank that now has 24 million British customers — and wonders whether its story is too good to be true If ever a banking deal came with the curse of the black spot, it was the takeover of Dutch bank ABN Amro at the
It’s easy to spot a member of the recession generation. They’re the sober, thoughtful young people. They’re our sons, daughters, nieces, nephews and friends aged between about 18 and 23 and beginning their adult lives at a time when six million are on benefits. Like the generation above, they love iPods and TopShop. But they’re
We’re all Shanghai gamblers now You might think yourself a fairly cautious investor. Maybe you dabble in a few shares and unit trusts, probably in major, well-established markets such as the US, Japan or Germany, as well as London. Emerging markets, and in particular the wild frontier that is China, you might reckon best left
We’ve been bingeing on plastic for the past decade, says Matthew Lynn, and the £54 billion we owe as a result is about to knock another hole in the banking system One year on from the period of panic that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers, you might be forgiven for thinking the worst of
Gary Lineker once observed that football was a simple game in which 22 men ran around the pitch, and then the Germans won. Much the same could be said of the car industry. It’s a simple enough business, in which everyone spends billions on big factories and flashy dealerships. And then the Germans make all
Who will finally sit Gordon Brown down with a bottle of whisky, a loaded revolver and a copy of his own book on courage, and tell him the game is up? You might imagine the task would fall to Jack Straw, flanked by a couple of union bosses. In fact, it’s more likely to be
Jim Cowling has chosen the right moment to launch his new business. An experienced security consultant, he has just set up a company called Shipguard, with a small office in Clerkenwell. The product: providing the men, the know-how, and if necessary the weapons, to defeat the pirates that are the scourge of Somali waters. ‘We’re
Recessions end. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s, about which we have heard so much recently, eventually ran its course, though it took a world war to get business booming again. ‘Thatcher’s wasteland’ of dole queues, urban riots and closed steel mills in the early 1980s gave way swiftly to a world of rampant
It has been a terrible 12 months for investors. It didn’t make much difference whether you invested in stocks, commodities or corporate bonds, the chances were you took a hammering. Even gold failed to sparkle as the credit crunch cut a swath through every kind of asset class. And yet there were a few individuals
Among the many overused clichés that have been dusted off to describe the chaos in financial markets over the past few months is the observation that this is ‘a crisis like no other’. Yet in one rather dark respect, it is following convention to the letter. As losses pile up and billions evaporate, an increasing
Matthew Lynn says banks that prospered by offering exclusive ‘wealth management’ services during the boom years are about to encounter some very angry customers Of all the phrases in the financial lexicon, ‘private banker’ is one of the most evocative. It summons up images of discreet addresses in the more remote Swiss cantons, of luxuriously
It would be hard to imagine a worse run of events for paper money. Investment banks such as Lehman Brothers have drowned in a sea of subprime debt. Building societies such as Bradford & Bingley, once so dull and safe they made fun of it in their ads, have had to be nationalised. In the
There is probably no company in the world as iconic as General Motors. As the manufacturer of Cadillacs, Buicks and Chevrolets, as well as Opels in Europe and Vauxhalls in Britain, it would be no exaggeration to describe GM as the corporation that perfected 20th-century industrial capitalism. Henry Ford created the first mass-production car 100