When the Manchester-based Co-operative Bank was announced last July as the buyer of 632 Lloyds branches, tripling the size of its own network, I hailed the news as a step forward for ‘banking biodiversity’. In February, George Osborne was still praising the deal, codenamed Project Verde, as one that would ‘shake up the established players’.
You may have gathered from last week’s column that I’ve been cruising the Med in search of fresh subject matter. It’s the sort of cruise that includes a programme of lectures, and the star turn on that front has been the Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, enjoying a change of pulpit after his much-praised
This column comes to you from the cruise ship Minerva in the Greek port of Piraeus. Why I’m aboard is a story for another day — and let me admit up front that, as financial-crisis reportage goes, observations provoked by a Homeric vista of islands and cocktails on the poop deck are unlikely to match
Economists should always leave themselves a margin for error. When challenged that free-market policies on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s led straight from boom to bust, Milton Friedman argued that problems arose not when politicians applied his prescriptions too dogmatically, but because they only ever did so half-heartedly. John Maynard Keynes, the
Unless you bet your life savings on gold some time in the past three years — after its price had passed on the way up the level to which it has now fallen back — there’s no need to be distressed by headlines about a ‘gold rout’, nor even the prospect of a ‘bear embrace’.
‘Margaret had no love for the banks,’ Nigel Lawson wrote in The View from No. 11. The idea that the amoral greed of the City and the banking crisis it fuelled should be blamed on Margaret Thatcher has been much bandied about this week. Let me try to put it in -perspective. In her early
A short stroll from Poultry to the Mansion House offers vistas of the old and new City. The fortress of the Bank of England awaits its new Governor while the Royal Exchange earns its keep, like much of the modern Square Mile, as an upmarket nest of boutiques and eateries. The Lutyens-designed headquarters of the
In their second attempt to clean the Augean stables of Cyprus’s banking system without jeopardising the integrity of the euro, bailout negotiators seem to have heeded most of my advice from last week. After the 36-0 rejection by the Cypriot parliament of a first set of terms that included a levy on all bank deposits,
The Cypriots are the authors of their own misfortune, having turned their banking system into a rackety offshore haven for Russian loot and lent most of the proceeds to Greece. But it was madness on the part of bailout negotiators to shake confidence in banks across the eurozone by trying to impose a levy on
‘We have written to David Cameron to applaud his decision to stick to the UK’s commitment to overseas aid to the developing world, despite the tough economic times,’ begins a letter to the Financial Times from the bosses of major companies from BP to Vodafone, with PR maestro Alan Parker of Brunswick at the top
‘Possibly the most deluded measure to come from Europe since Diocletian tried to fix the price of groceries across the Roman Empire,’ was Boris Johnson’s assessment of the proposal to cap bankers’ bonuses at 100 per cent of base salary, or 200 per cent with shareholders’ approval. This blunt exercise in market interference was tabled
‘There are two superpowers in the world today,’ said the American columnist Thomas Friedman in 1996. ‘There’s the United States and there’s Moody’s bond rating service. The US can destroy you by dropping bombs, and Moody’s can destroy you by downgrading your bonds.’ Well, not any more. Last Friday’s removal of triple-A status from British
We have had a very high failure rate in deliveries of the catalogues for Emily Patrick’s exhibition,’ says an email from the painter’s husband. ‘Over 50 per cent have been lost in the post or inexplicably delayed.’ Come to think of it, my own most recent Amazon order, allegedly dispatched a fortnight ago, hasn’t reached
Antony Jenkins, the new-broom chief executive of Barclays, has the tone of a junior minister, not long in parliament, who finds himself promoted to high office after the big beast who preceded him was toppled by scandal. In fact he’s been in the bank 30 years, climbing the ladder so quietly that none of my
Funny how little phrases go viral. Suddenly everyone’s talking about ‘fasting diets’, ‘zombie companies’ and ‘leadership plots’. As to the first, the idea of the ‘5:2 intermittent fasting diet’, I gather, is to eat as little as you can for two days a week. It’s all over the media, and any moment now someone will
Investing £33 billion in HS2 — £46 billion if you accept the Taxpayers’ Alliance’s calculation — won’t boost us out of this triple dip, but it might ease the one after next, early in the reign of hugely popular, three-times-married King Harry, in whose favour his elder brother will abdicate, Dutch-style, after his 50th birthday.
It’s only fair to warn you — especially if you’re Greek, Irish or Chinese — that this week’s column contains negative stereotyping. I’ll leave the transsexuals to Rod Liddle, but I’m still bracing for the Twitter storm. My propensity to commit this category of thought crime was first pointed out to me by Giorgos Papaconstantinou,
My item last week about brighter prospects for car makers looked forlorn by Friday lunchtime, when news bulletins were leading with a quote from one Tony Murphy of the Unite union to the effect that an announcement of 800 job cuts at Honda’s Swindon plant was ‘a hammer blow to UK manufacturing’. This was followed
So farewell, Wegelin & Co, the oldest bank in Switzerland and the one with the simplest strategy for growth — which was to offer secret accounts to American tax-evaders who could no longer obtain that valuable service from bigger Swiss banks such as UBS. Founded by a linen merchant in 1741, which makes it half
The sun shines warmly in south-west France, and rabbit bouillabaisse is the pièce de résistance of a New Year lunch at which Nigel Lawson is a fellow guest. The former chancellor and Spectator editor divides his time between his home in the Gers, the Global Warming Policy Foundation which he chairs, and the Parliamentary Commission