Any other business

Any other business | 14 May 2011

The latest mis-selling scandal is one more symptom of a deeper problem The payment protection insurance (PPI) scandal is, by common consensus, the worst case of financial mis-selling until the next one. These policies were foisted by banks on personal borrowers, supposedly to cover repayments if they fell ill or lost their jobs or encountered

Any other business | 7 May 2011

Warren Buffett isn’t always right – but he’s a $47 billion advertisement for optimism The legendary investor Warren Buffett has taken more flak than seems necessary for his lapse of judgment over his former lieutenant David Sokol, who bought shares in a company called Lubrizol before recommending it to Buffett as an acquisition for the

Any other business | 23 April 2011

Glencore’s partners are not offering equityto you and me out of a sense of charity We’re all going to be investors in Glencore, whether we like it or not. If the flotation of this giant commodity and mining group goes ahead next month at the valuation currently indicated, it will leap straight into the upper

Any other business | 16 April 2011

Vickers’s half-time score: not half as badas bankers feared or bashers hoped ‘Not half as bad as it might have been,’ was the reaction of the first banker I spoke to on Monday about the interim report of Sir John Vickers’s Independent Commission on Banking. ‘And forcing Lloyds to sell off a few more branches

Any other business | 9 April 2011

Sunny spells, icy showers and an inflationary wind blowing from America Daffodils everywhere and the FTSE is back around 6,000. Builders are busy after the frozen winter, it’s ‘business as usual’ again in financial services, and although manufacturing lost momentum in March — exports remained strong, but nervous consumers depressed domestic demand — industry is

Any other business | 2 April 2011

Farewell to a charismatic old bruiser who never threw in the towel George Walker, the former boxer, gangster’s minder and ‘leisure tycoon’ who died last week, was a persuader — both in the sense that he could be, as he once told me, ‘a bit rough with people’, and in the sense that if he

Any other business | 26 March 2011

Next, Osborne should tackle the plague of charity shops depressing our high streets The dramatic form of the modern, Brownian Budget speech requires a headline-grabber at the end to deflect commentators from analysis of the statistical soup and re-announced tax-tinkering that went before. But the politics of being ‘all in it together’ means that the rabbit

INVESTMENT SPECIAL: Rising in the East

The last time I wrote about wine for these pages, the global recession still lay ahead of us. In June 2008, fine wine prices were soaring on the back of the decision by the Hong Kong government to abolish import duty on wine (previously 40 per cent, and prior to that 80 per cent). The

INVESTMENT SPECIAL: This time he’s playing for keeps

For the outspoken Terry Smith, successful investing means never having to say ‘sell’ Terry Smith’s office is high up in Tower 42, formerly the NatWest tower, in Old Broad Street. It has a sweeping view over Docklands towards Essex, the neck of the woods with which he seems to be associated in the popular mind.

INVESTMENT SPECIAL: Folding money

Forget Bernie Madoff. The biggest Ponzi scheme in history is unfolding before your very eyes. If you have money in the bank, you will be a victim. The rot set in on 15 August 1971. That was the date on which the Nixon administration, reeling from the costs of the Vietnam war, unilaterally took the

Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 19 March 2011

Stoical and fatalistic, the Japanesenational character will rise to the challenge When I was a banker in Tokyo in the mid 1980s, it was my occasional pleasant task to tour the provinces visiting local banks which kept sterling accounts in London. I had nothing to sell, but my colleagues and I carried bags full of

Any other business | 12 March 2011

Has Mervyn lost touch with reality? No, but the City has lost its moral compass Mervyn King’s interview with Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph, in which the governor of the Bank of England accused the financial sector of exploiting gullible customers, gambling with other people’s money, lacking a moral compass, paying themselves excessively and

Any other business? | 5 March 2011

Freezing tyrants’ assets is easy, but how much will we send back to Tripoli? ‘Queen freezes Gaddafi family assets’ says a headline. That’ll teach the unhinged Libyan dictator to compare himself to our blessed monarch, as he did in one of his recent rants. But for all the spin about an emergency Privy Council meeting

Any other business | 26 February 2011

More women in the boardroom? Never mind the equality, watch the performance Successful businesswomen may scoff at the proposal of quotas for women in boardrooms — and many men will dismiss it as Euro-correctness gone mad (see Matthew Lynn, page 17). But I suggest that anyone who hopes to collect a private pension should welcome

Any other business | 19 February 2011

Another reason to cut bankers’ pay: the softer the product, the easier the job Is it harder to run a country or a global company? Variations of this dinner- party gambit cropped up wherever I went last week, offering a way of drawing together half a dozen business stories and political arguments. So here’s this

INVESTMENT SPECIAL: Brazilian adventure

An intrepid investor’s response to the global food shortage Entrepreneurs are prone to imaginative recruitment, so when the invitation to pack my bags for Buenos Aires came through, it should not perhaps have taken me by surprise. I have known Jim Slater, the veteran investor-entrepreneur, for several years. We meet periodically to discuss the stock

Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 12 February 2011

Which would you rather save – your local library or a County Hall paper-pusher? What a curious double life I lead. Half the week I’m your disembodied commentator from the world of high finance — my anonymity protected, as I truffle for City gossip, by a portrait drawing that (I’m told) doesn’t look like me

INVESTMENT SPECIAL: Passports to China

One of the remarkable statistics to emerge from the euroland crisis is the scale of UK trade with the Irish Republic. Export traffic across the Irish Sea amounts to 7 per cent of the total: more than all our trade with the fast growing ‘BRIC’ economies — Brazil, Russia, India and China. The consequence is

INVESTMENT SPECIAL: Sell the East, buy the West

The end is nigh for the Asian boom – but parts of Europe look perky At the beginning of 2010 I was asked to announce my ‘trade of the decade’. Forecasting ten years ahead should be easier than forecasting short-term. But at the time the global economic outlook was more than usually uncertain. That made

Any other business | 5 February 2011

Privatising forests must be a sensible policy if so many celebs are against it The more passionate the outcry against the government’s plan to privatise its English forestry estate, the more I feel the urge to cash in my meagre investments and bid for one of the forests in question myself. For a start, any