Ross Clark is a leader writer and columnist who has written for The Spectator for three decades. His books include Not Zero, The Road to Southend Pier, and Far From EUtopia: Why Europe is failing and Britain could do better
So, things really are different this time. The US Federal Reserve has decided to raise its Federal Funds Rate (its main interest rate) by a quarter-point, to 4.75 per cent – 5 per cent, in spite of a banking crisis that has seen two large banks fail in the past fortnight. For the past two
Does UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres really have any hope of persuading rich countries to commit to achieving net zero by 2040? This was a target he declared was vital as he launched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Sixth Assessment Report yesterday. He will have his work cut out. The trouble is that
If the emergency takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS was supposed to calm markets, it is not looking that way this morning. Markets are sharply down in Asia, and the FTSE fell by 1.5 per cent on opening this morning. Banks were the biggest fallers, losing up to 7 per cent of their value. There
Another Sunday, another banking takeover swiftly arranged before markets open on Monday morning. This time Credit Suisse has agreed to be bought by fellow Swiss bank UBS for 0.5 Swiss Francs a share – less than a third of its closing price on Friday and less than a tenth of what the bank was worth a
We are all, of course, pretty well doomed. We know that because Al Gore told us so in his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But just in case we didn’t get the message, the producer of that film, Scott Z Burns, has come up with a series of dystopian mini-dramas, Extrapolations, which are supposed to give
First the good news. Unlike the IMF, which predicted in January that the UK economy would have a worse 2023 than even Russia, the OECD’s latest forecast has Britain outperforming Russia. Now the bad news: the OECD still predicts the UK to perform worse than any European country other than Russia. Forecasts aside, the actual
When your largest single shareholder decides that enough is enough, that it is no longer prepared to throw good money after bad to prop up your finances, you really do have a problem. And that is exactly what has happened to Credit Suisse this morning. The Saudi National Bank, which owns a 10 per cent share
What is it about March? October, the month of the 1929 Wall Street crash and the crash of 1987, is often cited as the most dangerous for investors. Yet in the past three crashes or bear markets it has been March which saw the worst. The FTSE bottomed out in March 2003, shortly before the
On the face of it, the takeover of the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank by HSBC is a triumph for the government. Today, we could have been seeing the collapse of dozens of UK tech start-ups. We could have seen staff going unpaid and shares in tech companies plunging to greater depths than they have
Tech start-ups tend to involve taking big risks on ideas which are untested both in terms of technology and the market place. Yet it isn’t blind faith in new ideas that is threatening to bring down scores of British tech start-ups over the next few days: it is boring old bonds. Many start-ups have relied
How big a deal is it that Australia has chosen a British design for its nuclear submarines rather than the US one that it could have chosen? Does it really justify Rishi Sunak ‘bouncing on the balls of his feet’, as described by one minister? True, the machines aren’t actually going to be built in
And I thought the SNP were destined to win the award for this year’s most pathetic excuse – after Scottish transport minister Jenny Gilruth blamed the party’s failure to dual the A9 on Putin’s war in Ukraine. Then UK transport secretary Mark Harper turns up and tries to use the very same excuse for HS2’s
Why does our government have so much trouble criticising China? It doesn’t seem to have had a problem calling out Vladimir Putin. But Downing Street – along with the rest of Whitehall – seems determined to do Xi Jinping’s regime’s dirty work. Over the past ten days we have become used to seeing Matt Hancock as
It is one of those ancient mysteries: why has no Labour government been able to abolish private schools? Harold Wilson didn’t spare grammar schools (and nor did Edward Heath’s government, which followed). New Labour, too, for all its reforming zeal, never dared disembowel the independent sector. When the party did promise to do so –
Is Tony Blair ever going to give up hope of foisting ID cards on us? As prime minister, he was defeated over the issue – his plans were eventually dropped by the incoming coalition in 2010. He tried again during the pandemic, trying to sell us the idea of vaccination passports. And now he is
There have been celebrations this morning about a government surplus of £5.4 billion last month, and people are even talking about a ‘windfall’ for Chancellor Jeremy Hunt in next month’s Budget. But all this shows is how conditioned we have become to appalling economic news – and that we will grab at anything which seems
Sadiq Khan said told Radio 4 listeners this morning that, while he was grateful for the free school meals he received as a child at his primary school in Tooting, he felt stigmatised by having to queue up and eat separately from children whose parents were paying for their meals. If that is what his
The HSJ, as the Health Service Journal likes to be known these days, has managed to produce one of the most intriguing headlines of the week: ‘NHS is “pandering to ministers” by cutting its equality, diversity and inclusion teams to 35 whole-time posts.’ A mere 35? That, by the way, is merely the central administration
British Gas has behaved disgracefully towards energy customers who have fallen into arrears, sending agents to break into their homes and install prepayment meters – activities for which the company deserves to be ordered to pay millions of pounds in compensation. Meanwhile, Centrica, the owner of British Gas, has just reported full-year profits of £3.3
The world of business has long been creative with feeble excuses. Even so, the explanation given by Tim Slatter, chairman of Ford in Britain, for slashing 1,300 jobs in the UK, 1,000 of them in product development, does take the biscuit. The company is moving towards a wholly electric fleet of cars by the end of
