Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business I was sorry to hear Gillian Tett, the FT’s fragrant financial commentator, calling the eurozone’s southern members ‘pigs’ last week. In sunnier times, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain were referred to collectively as ‘Club Med’, but lately the acronym of their initial letters has come into common usage, with
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business Will I join the ticker-tape parade to welcome back Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and Congressman Henry B. Steagall of Alabama? Well, I might lurk in the crowd, but I certainly won’t be cheering. These venerable legislators sponsored the US Banking Act of 1933 which built a wall between
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business When I first met the former Bank of England governor Gordon Richardson, at a bankers’ jamboree in Japan, I remember thinking that he was smaller than I had imagined. So I was not surprised to read Sir Win Bischoff — long ago Richardson’s junior at Schroders and now chairman
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business If you don’t follow hospitality-trade news closely, you could be forgiven for thinking of Mitchells & Butlers as a Midlands-based brewery notable for its handsome Edwardian pubs. But it has not been that for decades, and if it was once an icon of progress in the beer trade, its
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business The winter is arctic and the economy is a long way from spring, but commodities are hot again. Gold, the doomsters’ favourite, has a charmed life of its own, though its recent ascent has run out of oomph. Copper, the metal of choice for professionals betting on global recovery,
It hardly came as a surprise that there were no knighthoods for bankers in the New Year honours list, and that even the blameless Lord Mayor of London, Ian Luder, received only a CBE, leaving him the first City alderman without a handle for 55 years — apparently as punishment for having spoken in favour
Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business It’s tempting to label the Noughties ‘the decade to forget’, except that we only get about eight decades each, so it doesn’t really seem wise to forget any of them. It was certainly a decade of nasty shocks — 9/11, the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 — and of
This Christmas my thoughts go out to the people of Cockermouth, perhaps my favourite little town in all England, as it was Wordsworth’s. Especially I think of its small shopkeepers, for what makes the town so delightful is its many tiny businesses, selling unusual and curious goods. So well-mannered and friendly are the people who
Is there a banker in the house? Well, please don’t ask me to go on apologising for you If I have one last sentiment to offer for 2009 — apart, of course, from warm compliments of the season — it is that I’m bloody fed up of apologising for bankers. I’ve been thinking this since
Madoff: The Man Who Stole $65 Billion Erin Arvedlund Penguin £9.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780141045467 ✆ £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me Sheryl Weinstein St Martin’s Press £14.56, 224 pages ISBN 9780312618377 Madoff with the Money Jerry Oppenheimer Wiley & Sons £16.99, 272 pages ISBN 9780470504987
The great mining predators are on the prowl again, says Judi Bevan. The Chinese are on a spending spree in Africa. And there’s plenty of room for canny investors to make money by following the deals closely For those worried they have missed the move in mining shares – the FT mining index has nearly
Unhappy anniversary. Ten years ago the Chancellor of the day was congratulating himself audibly on a job well done, and in the vaults of the Bank of England grumpy porters were sticking labels on the ingots to indicate a change of ownership. This was Gordon Brown’s great clearance sale. He had chosen to auction more
What bankers must do to earn customers’ trust Revd ‘Budge’ Firth, preaching more than half a century ago, reminded the City of its moral obligations It is required of stewards, that a man be found faithful. 1 Corinthians iv 2 In preparing this address, I thought at once of the text which I have chosen,
Merryn Somerset Webb doubts that markets will go on rising — and advises us how not to get poorer in 2010 Back in early 2007, an interviewer challenged my stance on the housing market. She pointed out that I had been bearish on the property market for several years but that the market did not
Elliot Wilson in Reykjavik Mike, a commodities trader from Chicago, leans over the table in Reykjavik’s Prikid bar and almost whispers: ‘What’s the deal here? Where are the breadlines?’ Our group looks befuddled. An Icelandic playwright mock-whispers back: ‘What breadlines? Did you expect Reykjavik to be full of bakeries?’ No, retorts Mike, but didn’t Iceland
You may have seen the recent Georgian marketing campaign on BBC World and CNN, which looks like a splicing of The Apprentice and the title sequence from The Professionals. Among the familiar names dropped in the ad, such as HSBC, is an enigmatic one, Rakia. And this, it turns out, is not Bosnian firewater, but
Here’s my hot prediction for 2009: house price inflation at 10 per cent. Yes, that is a 10 per cent increase, and yes, I do mean 2009. Halifax figures for the year to November were still showing prices down by 1.6 per cent — but believe me, by the end of this month housing will
Karl Ludvigsen is irritated by ill-informed criticism of the troubled American auto giant — which was once a model of quick, responsive and decentralised decision-making Outraged is too mild a word for the way I felt after reading a piece in the 12 November edition of the New York Times about General Motors. Focusing on
The hills of Michimikuru are a little piece of heaven: pickers in brightly coloured scarves move slowly through the chest-high bushes of the vivid green tea-fields beneath the slopes of Mount Kenya. But as the saying goes, local colour is other people’s poverty. Just ten kilometres to either side, the desert is encroaching; the mountain’s
Few people have ever seen them, except perhaps from a plane. Yet these huge, remote structures have stood planted in the North Sea, buffeted for decades by wind and wave, pumping cash into the UK economy. They are the hundreds of oil and gas platforms which churn out the equivalent of 2.8 million barrels of