‘How’s business?’ I asked the Mr Big of commercial property in a city somewhere north of Watford Gap last week. I won’t say which city, because this Mr Big is so big there – his logo is on office block after office block – that he would be instantly identifiable. ‘I’m a buyer for the
The other day I came across a clever book on the movie actor John Wayne. I forget the name of the author but it may have been Simon Louvish, who writes better than anyone else on the film-star world. This suggested that the secret of Wayne’s immense physical appeal was his instinctive contrapposto. When filmed
Matthew Lynn says London’s last 19th-century merchant bank, Close Brothers, is under threat of takeover by one of the modern breed of aggressive City traders, Andy Stewart Anyone approaching the headquarters of Close Brothers just off Broadgate in the heart of the City may be reminded of the words that open the Asterix books, about
Those of us born in the late 1970s have a great advantage when it comes to understanding today’s oil market: we cannot remember Opec embargoes, nor the double-digit inflation and bitter recessions they triggered. So while many of our elders and betters were predicting Armageddon as the price of oil climbed inexorably over the past
It’s not often your host has passed up dinner with Mick Jagger and the Maharaja of Jodhpur to take you to his country house for the weekend. But that’s what Rajeev Samant, the pioneer of India’s wine craze, lets slip as we begin the long drive north from Mumbai to his Sula vineyard. Samant has
Does anyone actually resign anymore? Nowadays a resignation is regarded not as a final act but as a temporary career break and that’s bad for business. Paul Gray – the former head of HM Revenue and Customs who ‘resigned’ two weeks ago after someone in his department posted the names, addresses and bank details of
One thing history teaches is the transience and futility of power, and the ultimate impotence of those who exercise it. That is the lesson of the current King Tut exhibition. No group of sovereigns ever enjoyed the illusion of power more than the pharaohs of the New Kingdom, especially those of the 18th and 19th
I met Vincent Cable recently at a dinner party with a mixture of City and business bigwigs: a few FTSE-100 bosses, a smattering of hedge-fund tycoons, the odd private-equity baron. The Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman was the only politician at the table and the debate inevitably focused on financial worries: the credit crunch, Northern Rock,
For a solvent mortgage lender to require emergency government support on a huge scale suggests that all is not well in our financial markets. This understatement matches the gorgeously hubristic claim from ‘Chuck’ Prince of Citigroup, America’s largest bank, in July, that ‘as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and
Edie G. Lush explains why we’re rarely asked to pay for online news and entertainment these days Amid the shockwaves caused by Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, one significant policy shift attracted relatively little attention. When the ink finally dries on the deal, one of Murdoch’s first moves
First there was the news of passengers rescued from lifeboats in Antarctica as their cruise ship went down after hitting an iceberg. Then Tim Price, our guest Investment columnist this week, reminded me of ex-Citigroup chief Chuck Prince’s observation about dancing as long as the music keeps playing. Then at a wedding on Saturday, a
Is it time for a reassessment of Sir Richard Branson? Chosen by the Treasury as the ‘preferred bidder’ for Northern Rock, he’s back where he craves to be and so often manages to put himself: in the headlines. And like every time he grabs the nation’s attention, two quite different caricatures of him have been
Marius Kloppers is a man who has clearly learnt that business is like warfare in at least one respect: if you’re planning an attack, it might as well be done quickly. On 1 October this year, the 45-year-old South African was installed as chief executive of the Australian mining conglomerate BHP Billiton. Within less than
I have been a technical analyst — or chartist, if you prefer — for 55 years, since reading that the stock market is the nearest thing to the classical economists’ definition of the perfect market, where price is determined purely in accordance with the law of supply and demand. More buyers than sellers, price rises;
Most hotel-group bosses like to be at the opening of each new property in their chain. Some claim to have slept in all of their establishments or even to have spent a night in every room. Not Andrew Cosslett. His company is the biggest hotel group in the world. It has 572,000 rooms in more
I hazarded here in February that it would probably be a good idea if the world’s largest bank were to be run, every now and again, by a banker. At last the board of Citigroup has come round to my point of view, though it might have saved shareholders a few billion dollars by doing
Students of words enjoy the way in which adjectives normally used to describe reprehensible actions are whitewashed to become terms of praise. One instance, which has caught my eye recently, is ‘aggressive’. In the past few days I have seen a firm’s brochure praising its ‘aggressive approach to the worldwide sale of megayachts’, a reference
With Alistair Darling coming under increasing pressure after the loss of the personal data of twenty-five million people by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Martin Vander Weyer reviews how Darling and Gordon Brown have also moved into the firing line in the whole Northern Rock debacle. They along with its employees and shareholders now have the
There is a lot of borrowing around these days. How can we judge this? Last year, total securities issuance came in at $11.5 trillion, about 25 per cent of world GDP according to IMF estimates. This statistic is every bit as batty — and as true — as the tabloid headline in 1989 that the
For a man who has been Chancellor of the Exchequer for just over four months, Alistair Darling has certainly made some powerful enemies. In fact, it’s hard to think of anybody important with whom he hasn’t fallen out. Sir Ronald Cohen, the private equity king who is one of Labour’s most prominent business supporters, has