The voice of business has been all but silent in the Brexit debate ever since former Marks & Spencer boss Stuart Rose made such a hash of trying to lead the pre-referendum ‘Britain Stronger in Europe campaign’. Now suddenly there’s a business cacophony: Airbus, BMW, Siemens and the heads of the CBI, the Institute of
Should he stay or should he go — or will he already have gone by the time you read this? These are frequently asked questions about chief executives whose businesses hit troubled waters. It’s true that the higher you rise, the higher the risk if you don’t deliver, but it’s not always true that bosses
At last the government has restarted the process of selling its stake in Royal Bank of Scotland. A first £2 billion sale in 2015 (of 5 per cent of the bank’s shares) took place at 330 pence per share, against a purchase price of 502 pence in the 2008 bailout. Those numbers looked so embarrassing
I’m not in the least surprised to learn that WH Smith has been voted Britain’s worst high-street retailer in a Which? survey of more than 10,000 consumers: this is the eighth year in a row that the newsagent and bookseller has come bottom or second-to-bottom in the same poll. These days its cramped shops give
If Ben Broadbent’s Daily Telegraph interview last week was the launch of a bid for the governorship of the Bank of England, then it spectacularly misfired. The deputy governor’s use of ‘-menopausal’ to describe an economy past its productive peak — damned by the Guardian as ‘un-abashed misogyny’ even though his awkward metaphor, on closer
It’s heartening to see an authentic British entrepreneur heading this year’s Sunday Times Rich List, the industrial-ist Jim Ratcliffe, who has overtaken a coach-load of oligarchs as well as the Duke of Westminster with an estimated £21 billion fortune. This column has long admired Ratcliffe, whose Ineos chemicals conglomerate was built by buying up businesses his
The bank holiday turned out to be a hot one, not least in the takeover arena. First, Shire Pharmaceutical accepted a £46 billion offer from Takeda of Japan — though the stock market did not seem wholly convinced that the deal will proceed. If it does, should we care? Shire is a FTSE100 company that
The systems breakdown at TSB is not (yet) the worst UK bank computer cock-up of all time: that prize is held by RBS, whose problems in 2012 afflicted customers for a month and attracted a £56 million fine. But the failure of TSB to migrate four million customers’ accounts from systems bequeathed by its former
The season of high-street banks’ annual general meetings is with us and I urge you to turn up and make trouble. When I say ‘you’, I don’t mean the likes of New York ‘activist’ Edward Bramson — who holds 5 per cent of Barclays and may or may not agitate for a boardroom seat at
I’m proud to be a member of the 661-year-old Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York, having qualified on the strength of a first career spent trying to sell British financial services around the globe from Hokkaido to Gdansk. Before our annual feast last week we prayed optimistically for the discovery of ‘a
A decade ago I commissioned an article about Vladimir Putin’s business cronies. Among other lines of enquiry, it sought to finger ‘a coterie of wealthy and politically influential industrialists, many believed to be former or current secret service officials’ who allegedly had shareholdings in Russian companies which, if we or anyone else had been able
‘Stocks plunge as China hits US goods with tariffs,’ said a headline after the long weekend, and the FTSE100 duly dipped below 7,000. But I wonder what a serious trade war would look like — and how markets would respond if the White House and Beijing took the gloves off. Last year, China exported $500
I remember the arrival of Toys ‘R’ Us in Britain, because as a young banker in 1984 I was tasked with devising a menu of exciting financial products to offer a brash American retailer that was clearly going to take a bite out of our sleepy — and in those days still Christmas-seasonal — domestic
My decision to vote Remain was driven in part by an exercise in which I tried to identify anyone close to me in Yorkshire — family, neighbour, business owner, farmer — who was worse off as a result of UK membership of the EU. The only people uncontestably in that category, I concluded, were the
As ‘business lobby groups’ go, the Institute of Directors has always struck me as worthy but unexciting: a more authentic voice of mid-sized corporate Britain than the fat-cat smugfest that is the CBI; a fount of sound advice on governance, gender equality and ‘mental health at work’; and a handy Pall Mall watering hole for
Theresa May has belatedly taken the advice I offered her here last May and named a supremo to tackle the housing crisis — which has been getting steadily worse since her campaign promise to ‘fix the broken market’. But the supremo isn’t Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary who is, the prime minister says, doing ‘incredible
A mixed bag of annual results from the big banks. RBS, still 73 per cent owned by the taxpayer, recorded a small profit for the first time since 2008 but took flak for a newly released report on the outrageous behaviour of its Global Restructuring Group, the team that mistreated struggling business customers in the
The fallout from Carillion’s bankruptcy spreads in slow motion — just as the outsourcing and construction giant’s finances gradually stretched to breaking point over the months before it went down in January. The company’s auditor, KPMG, was rightly under the spotlight this week. But the impact on the ground seems to have been less disruptive
The Serious Fraud Office has upped the stakes in the case of the controversial $3 billion Qatari financing that saved Barclays from a taxpayer bailout in 2008, by extending the charge of ‘unlawful financial assistance’ to the operating company, Barclays Bank plc, as well as the parent, Barclays plc. Four senior former Barclays employees, including
If you were the incoming or retiring chairman of the Federal Reserve, you might be quietly pleased to see stock markets plunge on the day of the handover. As Jerome Powell was sworn in on Monday to succeed Dr Janet Yellen as head of America’s central bank, the Dow Jones index of leading US stocks
