Twenty-five years ago this week, I became managing director of BZW (predecessor of Barclays Capital) in Hong Kong. The office was unstable after a summer of firings, and I had been dispatched from Tokyo to steady the ship. On Friday afternoon, a man called Reggie from Warburgs shouted ‘Heard the news from home?’ across the
George Osborne knows how to stick pins in his enemies. Using the phrase ‘Workers of the world unite’ to introduce a wheeze that will allow employees to swap employment rights for shares in their employer got well up the noses of the left. ‘There are so many holes in this it deserves to sink without
Like most country dwellers, I have a sneaking admiration for the fox but for the hedgehog I have real affection. So I was entertained to find references to these creatures which might help Downing Street decide who to appoint to the governorship of the Bank of England, for which applications close on Monday. Both draw
You might think it redundant to say that the world’s biggest manufacturer of telecoms equipment is a name to watch. But Huawei — which isn’t quite pronounced ‘Who are we?’ but perhaps ought to be — really does deserve scrutiny. This beacon of Chinese enterprise overtook its main rival, Ericsson of Sweden, in the first
When BAE Systems sold its one-fifth stake in the European Airbus project to EADS in 2006, declaring its intention to focus instead on defence sales in the US, I predicted that ‘the best bits of BAE’ would end up under American ownership while the rest would ‘go the way of the Comet’, the 1950s British
Could there be a more vivid cautionary tale for Vince Cable and others who yearn for interventionist industrial policies than the Commons Public Accounts Committee’s report on the failures of the Regional Growth Fund? This £1.4 billion bundle of largesse was created in April last year at the instigation of Nick Clegg and as a
Here’s your starter for ten: what is Australia’s third largest export industry, behind coal and iron ore? The answer is education, which contributes the equivalent of around £11 billion a year in foreign exchange earnings, mostly fees from Asian students in Australian colleges. Even during the great commodity boom, education earnings have grown faster than
In my list of things to do before I die, going up in a hot-air balloon with Sir Richard Branson ranks pretty low. But still I admire his fighting spirit: he hates to lose, or to let his enemies and critics get the better of him. He saw off British Airways’ dirty tricks over the
I’ve had a picture on my wall of the newly appointed Barclays chairman, Sir David Walker, for about 25 years. If that sounds creepy, I should explain that it’s a photograph of a 1986 meeting of the Court of the Bank of England, of which my father was a member. Walker, then an up-and-coming forty-something,
If you had asked me last week for a thumbnail sketch of Standard Chartered, I might have said: ‘Steadily profitable overseas bank, strong historic franchise in Asia and Africa, keeps its nose clean.’I might have added that Peter Sands, its chief executive, and Lord (Mervyn) Davies, his predecessor who went on to serve as trade
A ‘triple dip’ sounds like a move that might defeat a drug-pumped Olympic gymnast, but it’s what some City pundits now expect the UK economy to perform. After a 0.7 per cent drop in GDP between April and June — the third consecutive quarter of the double-dip recession — a ‘technical bounce’ should make the
Hail to the Co-operative Bank, which has snapped up the 632 branches that Lloyds was under orders from Brussels to shed by next year. The price looks like a buy-one-get-one-free sofa sale: £350 million down with £400 million to pay over 15 years ‘if targets are met’, against Lloyds’ initial expectation of £1.5 billion-plus. That’s
The symbolism of the Olympic flame, last seen meandering through Kent, has been much misunderstood. Forget the propaganda about ‘shining a light on local communities’. When Toby Young took his children to watch the relay pass through Dartmouth, he found it ‘not merely tarnished, but ruined by the heavy-handedness of the sponsors’ — Lloyds TSB,
The biggest mis-selling scandal to break this month was not the one which involved banks forcing small business borrowers to buy expensive interest-rate hedging contracts, under threat of not lending to them at all if they refused. The FSA hasn’t got to the bottom of that one yet: in terms of identifiable victims it could
‘My dad once said that the only time he’d ever heard me say “never” was when I was asked if I’d had enough,’ Bob Diamond told me in 2009. You might guess, given the nine-digit fortune he scooped from Barclays during a 16-year tenure which ended on Tuesday morning, that what he could never get
The great NatWest-RBS computer cock-up has upstaged my personal campaign to expose the lamentable standards of service offered by high-street banks. I was relieved not to find 12 million emails in my inbox from all those whose wages have not been paid or whose house purchases have been held up, and now have to chase
‘Greeks choose austerity over chaos,’ said a typical headline on Monday morning. But in truth the argument for austerity is pretty much lost, and we might as well move on to the argument about inequality — and related arguments about volatility, more of which below. While anti-austerity socialists secured a majority in the French parliament,
In this anxious lull between the Spanish bailout and the Greek election result, the most potent symbol of the continent’s perilous financial state is Madrid’s Puerta de Europa, or ‘Gateway to Europe’. That happens to be the name of the twin skyscrapers that lean towards each other at a sickening angle over the shoulders of
I’m not quite as bowled over by IMF chief Christine Lagarde as the BBC’s Robert Peston seems to be, but I’m an admirer — and I’m finding it hard to shake off a mental image of her as a teenage member of the French synchronised swimming team. That apart, she’s almost alone on the world
While François Hollande was being shoulder-barged by Angela Merkel as they inspected a rained-on guard of honour during the French president’s tense first visit to Berlin, I was enjoying a parallel encounter with military formality in the spring sunshine of Rome. In town to lecture at the Nato Defence College, I shared a staff car