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
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
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
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
Interim findings from my Really Independent Commission on banking reform The Warden of All Souls, Sir John Vickers, has revealed the outlines of what he thinks about banking reform, so perhaps the Warden of Any Other Business — that’s me — should do likewise. Vickers, a former Bank of England economist, is chairman of the
It’s business, Russian-style – and let’s hope it’sthird time lucky for BP’s Bob Dudley ‘It was just business, Russian-style.’ That was how Bob Dudley described to me his experience in 2008 of having to manage the TNK-BP joint venture in Siberia by email from a secret location in Central Europe — because BP’s Russian partners
Rising petrol prices and the death of Nigel increase my sense of foreboding I returned from a New Year expedition to the Dordogne laden with wine, walnuts and a deep sense of foreboding — not provoked by the mood of rural France, which felt unchangingly placid, but by what I’ve been reading and hearing about
A knighthood for the last banker who put his shareholders’ interests first The New Year honours list is always a vivid indicator of the times just gone by. No brand better encapsulated the feelgood consumer frenzy of the last decade than Lush, the purveyor of organic soaps and Fairtrade lotions alongside campaigns to save sharks
In the land of my Flemish forefathers, I draw a key lesson for 2011: always have a Plan B To Ghent, in the land of my ancestors, to address a conclave of ‘risk managers’. Though the mother tongue of most participants is Dutch or French, the conference is in English — and I feel obliged to
From elections to ash clouds, 2010 was a year that taught us to expect the unexpected This was a year of predictable trends and unpredictable events. It was predictable that the UK would limp out of recession behind France, Germany and the US, and a reasonable bet both that we would avoid a double dip
Why the Governor is in the soup — and how I got the soup into the Governor I’m no WikiLeaker, but I am prepared to reveal that I have, on two occasions, lunched à deux with Professor Mervyn King in his private dining room at the Bank of England. Not a single word of what
What Ireland lacks now are statesmen who can make the case that recovery is possible The screen at Manchester airport tells me I’m about to board an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, but there’s a Lufthansa plane at the gate. ‘Blimey,’ I mutter, ‘this bailout’s moving fast.’ I’m looking at the wrong gate, however, and
My tip for enterprise tsar from Cameron’s list of loads-of-money peers: Lord Fellowes of Downton Who, I wonder, will advise David Cameron on entrepreneurship now that Lord Young of Graffham has been fed to the sharks by the Downing Street crew for his unguarded remark that in this ‘so-called recession… most people have never had
Caught between EU politicking and market sharks, the Irish deserve sympathy not scorn My sympathies are with the Irish as they find themselves being shoved towards an EU bailout which they regard as a loss of hard-won sovereignty — and it’s pointless to go on scoffing at their earlier eagerness to enjoy the low euro
Disappointed, discouraged – but American optimism will soon start to return Philadelphia ‘We should always love America, not for its leaders — who generally turn out as disappointing as our own — but for its vitality, its collective belief in the possibility of renewal.’ That’s what I wrote from Los Angeles, exactly two years ago,
Change is coming to the City – but let’s notget excited about a tacky shopping centre One New Change sounds like an unambitious and probably tautologous political slogan, but it’s actually a postal address. New Change is a cut-through from Cheapside to Cannon Street, ‘Change’ in this context being an old version of Exchange, as
Good news for the governor: a groundswell of responses to the era of bad banking ‘Of all the many ways of organising banking,’ declared the Governor of the Bank of England this week, ‘the worst is the one we have today.’ That spurred me to continue my search for ‘relationship banking’ — and the latest
If I hear one more clunking metaphor about how we’re trapped in the debt mine but there’s light at the end of the tunnel, I think I’ll bury myself in the garden. If I hear one more clunking metaphor about how we’re trapped in the debt mine but there’s light at the end of the
‘A jolly nice little place for lunch, handy because you can get to it on a number 11 bus.’ That was a senior partner of Cazenove the stockbrokers talking about the Savoy in the days when captains of industry and City grandees treated its Grill as their canteen — and my predecessor Christopher Fildes, who
The crash has led to a new boom in corporate bonds. When Tesco’s debt yields more than its shares, every little helps When the Bank of England began its £200 billion programme of quantitative easing — ‘QE’, its technical name for printing money — at the height of the credit crisis in March last year,