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’
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
Matthew Lynn says Britain’s largest building society prospered by refusing to follow fashion — while its bolder, greedier rivals have all gone bust or been taken over Over the last 25 years, Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare has been a poor guide to financial markets. As the swashbuckling investment banks rose in
Matthew Lynn says coffee is the pure brew of capitalism — as the credit crunch bites, no wonder the world’s most ubiquitous coffee-house chain is heading for trouble In Christopher Guest’s witty canine mockumentary Best In Show, there is a line of dialogue that tells you everything you need to know about the world’s biggest
Matthew Lynn on domain name sales In Amsterdam, on the afternoon of 26 June, the pound is finally being sold off. No, Gordon Brown hasn’t decided to repeat his famous trick of dumping a chunk of the nation’s gold reserves at the nadir of the bullion market. Nor has Mervyn King decided the outlook for
Matthew Lynn wonders whether the world’s greatest investor will be able to pick winners in continental Europe the way he has for more than four decades in the US If Warren Buffett had not become famous as the world’s richest man — a career choice that trumps most alternatives — he could still have carved
Matthew Lynn says hedge-fund pioneer and currency speculator George Soros is still a brilliant player of markets — but as a philosopher, frankly, he’s incomprehensible If nothing else, three decades as one of the world’s most successful speculators has taught George Soros how to pitch a book. While the main title of his latest work,
A collapsing property market, slowing consumer spending, rising unemployment and an economy that is fast deflating: that might sound all too much like a forecast for the British economy. But actually it’s a description of the Irish economy right now. For the last decade, Ireland has been the most dynamic economy in Europe, with growth
The title of the worst deal in British corporate history is hotly contested. Glaxo and SmithKline were worth £107 billion on the day they announced their merger: eight years later, they’re worth £57 billion, and they’re not quite the ‘kings of science’ their chief executive Jean-Pierre Garnier said they would be. Getting on for a
Matthew Lynn visits the Bentley factory in Crewe — where Spitfires were once built — and discovers how Volkswagen’s engineers and marketing men have revived the classic marque Turn right as you step into the plush foyer of Bentley’s Crewe headquarters and you find yourself in the company’s museum — a display of gorgeously preserved
Matthew Lynn says London’s last 19th-century merchant bank, Close Brothers, is under threat of takeover by one of the modern breed of aggressive City traders, Andy Stewart Anyone approaching the headquarters of Close Brothers just off Broadgate in the heart of the City may be reminded of the words that open the Asterix books, about
Marius Kloppers is a man who has clearly learnt that business is like warfare in at least one respect: if you’re planning an attack, it might as well be done quickly. On 1 October this year, the 45-year-old South African was installed as chief executive of the Australian mining conglomerate BHP Billiton. Within less than
Matthew Lynn says shareholder activist Eric Knight is right to castigate HSBC’s strategy, and that the bank’s deeply religious chairman Stephen Green now faces a battle to hang on to his job When he isn’t running the world’s second biggest bank, Stephen Green, the chairman of HSBC, is an ordained priest and amateur theologian. In
It wasn’t hard to see what was in it for President Nicolas Sarkozy when he appointed Christine Lagarde as France’s new finance minister in June this year. After a glittering career in international law, Lagarde had become a star in American business circles: the 30th most powerful woman in the world, according to that ultimate
Nobody expects total honesty from politicians, particularly on the campaign trail. Still, when the new French president Nicolas Sarkozy promised a ‘rupture’ with France’s past, and even praised Margaret Thatcher for her willingness to ‘break taboos’, you might have expected the pledge to hold good at least for a few months. And yet since assuming
The fiercer the fighting for our boys in Basra and Helmand, the more important you may think it is that Britain has a thriving arms industry to supply them. The reasons that this isn’t so can be summed up in one Arabic phrase which translates, ironically, as ‘dove of peace’: Al Yamamah. The fiercer the
Amid the acres of coverage devoted to the 40th anniversary of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most celebrated record in pop history, one irony has been overlooked. The album was considered as ephemeral as any other when it came out, but has grown mightier and mightier; the company that made it, on the
When Lazard presented its results at the start of May, you might have expected the investment bank’s smooth-talking chairman Bruce Wasserstein to have been in upbeat mood. After all, Wasserstein trades on his reputation as the greatest mergers and acquisitions banker of all time. Lazard likes to think of itself as the finest M&A house
Most of the young men working on ‘hedge fund alley’, the narrow streets leading away from Berkeley Square in Mayfair, have expensive but unsinister ambitions. They’d like a new Aston Martin DB7, preferably convertible. They’d like a swanky new penthouse overlooking the Thames, plus a girlfriend who might have stepped out of the pages of
Even allowing for retro-chic, there were some things from the 1970s that most of us assumed were never coming back: cheese-and-wine parties, lime-green bathroom suites, and trade unions setting industrial policy. The little cubes of cheese and the green baths look safely forgotten. But the brothers? They’re back. In the past few months, trade unions
Before the number-crunchers of private equity and the hedge-fund world took control, the City was dominated by a pretty rough gang. Predatory tycoons such as Lords Hanson and White, Tiny Rowland of Lonrho and Sir Nigel Broakes of Trafalgar House were the big beasts of the stock market. They created conglomerates to match their egos,