Any other business

Nicola Sturgeon depresses me and seems to be having the same effect on Scottish house prices. In a housing market described by departing Bank of England economist Andy Haldane as ‘on fire’, the flames have been rising higher the further away from London — but more or less extinguishing themselves at Hadrian’s Wall. Why buyers

The late Sir Ken Morrison — founder of the eponymous supermarket chain that’s the latest UK target for US private equity — had the blunt manner of the Yorkshire cattle farmer he became in reluctant retirement after he was ousted by his own board. Criticising his successors from the floor at one of his last

The snatching of a 12 per cent stake in BT by French entrepreneur Patrick Drahi, last seen here when he bagged Sotheby’s for $3.7 billion two years ago, could be a good thing if it injects dynamism into the telecoms giant’s late-running plans to install high-speed broadband across the UK. But it’s also part of

Companies should willingly pay tax wherever they generate profits — this column has long argued — because it’s fair they should contribute to the cost of the public services on which all business ultimately relies, and because the reputation of capitalism as a whole is tainted when corporate tax bills are reduced to absurdly low

‘Feed the ducks when they’re quacking’ sounds like advice from a foie gras farmer — but let’s leave gastronomy till last and focus first on stock market activity. The saying actually comes from Wall Street and means that if investor demand is strong, it’s best satisfied with ample supplies of new stock. What’s wrong with

The long-awaited review of the railways by former British Airways executive Keith Williams chugged past the platform of public debate without creating much stir. Politicos noted that it had become ‘the Williams-Shapps Plan’, indicating an urge on the part of Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, in Tony Blair’s words, to be personally associated with eye-catching initiatives

‘Consider a temporary cut in executive salaries’ was the Confederation of British Industry’s advice to members at the start of the pandemic. Back then I was gripped by fears of a backlash against capitalism: top pay cuts would indeed be wise, I wrote, not least because ‘sacrifice now is sensible insurance’. Looking at last week’s

‘We are seeing very substantial inflation,’ the great investor Warren Buffett told shareholders in his master company Berkshire Hathaway at their online annual meeting last weekend. He was talking chiefly about the housebuilding businesses in his port-folio, hit by rising material costs in what he called a ‘red hot’ economic recovery. But his remarks align

The alleged frauds for which the Post Office prosecuted no fewer than 736 of its sub-postmasters has turned out in almost all cases to be the result of faults in a computer system called Horizon which Post Office managers and the system’s supplier, Fujitsu of Japan, were reluctant to acknowledge. That’s the short summary of

The market emphatically endorsed my negative opinion of the Deliveroo share offer, which bombed from its offer price of 390p to close at 282p before Easter. The biggest London IPO since the commodity giant Glencore went public in 2011 now also stands as the most embarrassing flop in living City memory. Goldman Sachs and JP

‘The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism — because of greed, my friends.’ So Boris Johnson told his backbenchers last week, though he immediately muttered ‘Forget I said that’ while aides tried to explain it as a joke on the chief whip, who was munching a cheese and pickle sandwich at

Just as the auto industry embraces the electric future I wrote about last month, it hits a new crisis: a shortage of the microchips that power everything under the bonnet. As a parable of globalisation’s perils, this one has all the ingredients from trade war to fire, drought and Covid pestilence. When car production slumped

Historians of unforeseen crises talk about ‘chaos theory’ and the ‘butterfly effect’, in which a small perturbation far away — the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Australia, as it were — have impacts across much larger connected systems. More usually applied to weather events, the theory had its 2008 moment when the collapse of

This column generally takes a sceptical view of financial novelties and gimmicks. So my antennae have twitched in recent days at frequent mentions of Spacs, or ‘Special Purpose Acquisition Companies’, which are the latest plaything of Wall Street and could be about to go large over here. Also known as a ‘blank cheque’ company, a

Why should business pay tax at all? That’s a provocative but forlorn question to ask in Budget week. Business pays corporation tax on profits because that’s what voters expect, partly because many are conditioned to believe profit is a sin and partly because all would prefer to pay less tax themselves. Investors pay tax on

Back in November, when Downing Street’s pandemic responses looked daily more incompetent, the announcement of a ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030, ten years earlier than originally planned, was largely greeted — along with the rest of the ‘Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution’ — as another exercise

No sign of progress towards a workable deal with the EU for financial services, on which news is due next month. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned in unusually frank terms this week that although the UK has granted ‘equivalence’ to the EU in some financial activities, ‘the EU has not so far done