London’s capital market needs a kick in the pants, as I write every week, and ‘activist investors’ are no bad thing if they provoke sharper corporate performance. The assault by the New York hedge funder Boaz Weinstein on seven UK investment trusts – demanding shareholder votes to replace directors with his own people and take
I long to write less about Rachel Reeves and more about world-beating British businesses – such as Brompton, the folding bicycle maker whose fortunes I have followed since I bought the product and interviewed the founder-designer, Andrew Ritchie, 20 years ago. The latest Brompton news was that profits collapsed from £11 million in 2023 to
Headed for ‘the worst of all worlds’ is not where any of us would wish to find ourselves at the start of the new year. But that was the phrase used by the CBI economist Alpesh Paleja to sum up the predictions of member businesses – of reduced hiring and output, rising prices and weak
Forty years ago this Christmas I visited Hong Kong for the first time – a few days after the signing in Beijing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration that sealed the former colony’s transfer to mainland rule in 1997. It was a moment of apprehension, but at least the timetable had been set. And how lucky
Woke it may be, but Jaguar’s ‘Copy Nothing’ video is a work of marketing genius. With its ungendered models, ungrammatical slogans (‘live vivid’, ‘delete ordinary’) and strange absence of cars, the 30-second ad has brought global attention to a brand that was dying for want of a new generation of customers, in an auto industry
How is it possible that we’re still reading headlines about the £4 billion fundraising from the Gulf that saved Barclays from a bailout in 2008? It’s not too sweeping to say that most of the financial world smelled something fishy in the undisclosed £322 million of advisory fees that were paid to Qatari investors –
Regular invitations to Mansion House banquets petered out after I asked a shifty-looking waiter for a glass of champagne and he told me he was a deputy governor of the Bank of England. So I can’t report firsthand whether last week’s speech by Chancellor Rachel Reeves was greeted by assembled financiers with napkins on their
This column comes to you from Atlanta, Georgia, where but for one giant ‘Trump Stands Up For Families’ billboard and some Harris-Walz placards in the leafier suburbs, you would hardly know there had just been an election. I was hoping to report a whiff of teargas after a contested result, but no. Urban Atlanta voted
I confess I was lunching at L’Escargot in Greek Street as Rachel Reeves delivered her Budget. My excuse was that I thought I already knew what was in it – but in reality the package was even more anti-business than I feared. My punishment was a risotto too glutinous to finish, but the Chancellor’s 76-minute
Anyone hunting for a ‘Trump trade’ at this late stage has probably missed the US election bus. If you bought gold as a traditional safe-haven asset back in February at £1,600 an ounce, you’d be a smug 33 per cent up by now – though my man in the bullion market tells me the rise
As the interminable Budget wait goes on, so does the trawl through the Chancellor’s bin bags. I refer to the old tabloid method of digging in celebrities’ dustbins for evidence of depravity or scandal; in Rachel Reeves’s case, that would mean piecing together shredded Treasury analyses on all the various tax wheezes floated since July.
Scheduling the Budget almost four months after their election victory would have counted as a monumental misjudgment for the Labour government were it not for all the other cock-ups that turned their first 100 days into a sitcom. Still, the extended period of speculation about which taxes Rachel Reeves is really planning to raise has
How excited are you to hear the Prime Minister talking tech with Eric Schmidt, an American billionaire who used to run Google? Me neither. But their on-stage conversation is billed as the highlight of the government’s International Investment Summit in London next week, designed to show the world the UK is ‘open for business’. What
So farewell, Ratcliffe-on-Soar: the UK’s last coal-fired power station shut down on Monday, having burned five million tonnes of coal per year since it opened in 1968. Back then, 80 per cent of national power came from coal, our primary energy source since the 1880s; at the turn of this century there were still 25
Next month’s Budget tax raids on capital have provoked a festival of creative doom-mongering on the fringes of Labour’s conference as well as in the columns of the business press. Most frequently voiced is the prediction that the 2,000 or so denizens of London’s private equity community who benefit from the ‘carried interest’ tax wheeze
The burden of higher taxation must fall on those with ‘the broadest shoulders’, says the Prime Minister, and City folks assume that means yet more raids on banks. Soft targets because no one loves them, they have also profited from higher interest rates. But they’re already subject to a surcharge on corporation tax and an
We expect Ryanair tickets to cost more on holiday Saturdays than term-time Tuesdays and Uber fares to surge in the rush hour. When bidders drive an Old Master painting into the millions, we praise the skill of the auctioneer. And of course dynamic prices can go down as well as up. These are market mechanisms
How passively we respond to revelations of Labour’s real direction of travel. As millions of pensioners brace for the confiscation of winter fuel payments and other Budget tax raids, shouldn’t they be pinning on their medals, raising their banners and marching down Whitehall – alongside columns of private school parents, furious at the imposition of
Back to work, back to school, back to politics: the French call it la rentrée and my own summer idyll in their country must end soon too. Back to the miserabilism of Starmerland – where all news, especially good news, must be seen as bad. What good news is that? I mean that shop prices
Twice I met the tech tycoon Mike Lynch, once a decade or so ago and again this year, shortly after he returned from his fraud trial acquittal in California. On the first occasion, I followed him as a speaker at a corporate conference in, of all places, the National Football Centre in Burton-on-Trent. He was
