Where do most investors go wrong in making their investment decisions? Warren Buffett, whom many like to think of as the world’s most successful stock market investor, has no doubts. People need to spend more time with their nose in a book, thinking about the way the world works, and less time looking at the
If recycling your domestic rubbish is a pain, imagine what it’s like running a car-repair workshop: batteries, bolts, bulbs, bumpers, plastics, oily rags, scrap metal and toxic liquids are just a few of the nasties. Understandably, most of Britain’s 25,000 garage owners either don’t bother — nearby rivers are handy — or they take the
John Andrews on city life in Liechtenstein. The speed limit on Swiss motorways is 120km per hour and, if you’re travelling from northern Italy to southern Germany through Switzerland at exactly that speed, you’ll spend a scant ten minutes traversing the entire western border of the sovereign Principality of Liechtenstein. Glance to your right about halfway up
To me, history has always had a double magic. On the one hand it is a remorseless, objective account of what actually happened, brutally honest, from which there is no appeal to sentiment. On the other, it is a past wreathed in mists and half-glimpses, poetic, glamorous and sinister, peopled by daemonic or angelic figures,
The proposals in the pre-Budget report were a desperate, knee-jerk response to the swing to the Tories in the polls. Rather than demonstrating Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling’s vision for the country, it revealed their commitment to blatant, vote-chasing expediency. Ultimately, this will make the country think less of them. Martin Vander Weyer There’s a
Can we make a link between the chopping of 1,500 jobs, mostly in London and New York, by the Swiss banking giant UBS, and the news that the City of London Corporation has come up with a £300 million contribution to the financing of Crossrail, the long-awaited Heathrow-to-Docklands transport link? Well, connecting unrelated news events
This is the time of year when I am irritated by the pop-pop of shotguns near my house in Over Stowey. Not that West Somerset is a great county for shooting. It is a place for hunting. I have counted up to 13 packs of hounds in the neighbourhood. Most of them are foxhounds, and
It wasn’t hard to see what was in it for President Nicolas Sarkozy when he appointed Christine Lagarde as France’s new finance minister in June this year. After a glittering career in international law, Lagarde had become a star in American business circles: the 30th most powerful woman in the world, according to that ultimate
What’s the biggest threat to the stability of the global economy today? Derivatives? Hedge funds? The credit crunch? Actually it could be Pearson, the company that owns the Financial Times. How so? By allowing its Penguin imprint to pay $8.5 million for the memoirs of Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve.
Elliot Wilson says there isn’t enough arable land in the world to make plant-based fuels a viable alternative to oil ‘Biofuels?’ Ricardo Leiman gives an imperious snort, his eyebrows wobbling. ‘Biofuels?’ he repeats in an offended tone, as if asked to perform a lewd act. ‘There’s about 20 million tonnes of processed edible oil on
When I bumped into Barclays chief executive John Varley at Wimbledon one mid-week afternoon in July, I thought he looked remarkably relaxed for a man locked in a potentially career-breaking takeover battle with his deadliest rival. We had just watched Venus Williams make mincemeat of Maria Sharapova, and perhaps Varley was cheered by the thought
The great thing about taking a holiday every year in the same place — provided it is the right place of course — is that you notice the huge, reassuring continuities, and the minute changes which prove that life, though stable, is at work. This is what I find in early autumn at Lake Como,
Simon Nixon says David Cameron’s Conservatives must stop sending out such mixed signals if they want to establish serious credibility with the business community Gordon Brown has done many things to discombobulate the Tories since becoming Prime Minister three months ago. But none so effective as the creation of a new ‘business advisory council’ including
First we heard about ‘sub-prime mortgages’; then it was ‘collateralised debt obligations’; now it’s the turn of ‘moral hazard’ to appear on the Ten O’Clock News. Jolted out of prosperous complacency by market turmoil, the public has started to care about economics: strange jargon and obscure concepts previously familiar only to investment bankers are going
The trade could only gasp at the figures Charlie Mayfield revealed a fortnight ago. Next week, the new chairman of John Lewis Partnership hopes they’ll be gasping again as he opens 17,000 square feet of food hall at John Lewis in Oxford Street. No, not quite a Waitrose, but something that he claims will be
They are waiting to enter the port of Newcastle, a hundred or more miles away. There they will load up with coal to feed the voracious economies of India and China. The waiting ships symbolise the Australian predicament. The country is a principal source of raw materials for the emerging giants of Asia but it
Jules Evans says billionaire industrialist Oleg Deripaska has global business ambitions — but a dispute with another Russian tycoon, Michael Cherney, may get in his way Oleg Deripaska wants it all. He already has quite a lot: assets in Russian insurance, pulp, construction, airports, media, cars, and oil, and a controlling stake in the world’s
While all eyes were on the crash of Northern Rock last week, something even scarier was happening. Two of Britain’s many house price indices — there were eight competing in a crowded market last time I counted — reminded us that property prices can fall as well as rise. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors
As the train trundled down to Littlehampton one warm summer afternoon in 1988, I was filled with excitement at the thought of meeting Anita Roddick. I had arranged to interview her for a book called The New Tycoons, which I was writing with my Sunday Times colleague John Jay, now my husband. Roddick was already
Hindsight suggests that the Rock was always likely to get the Northern into trouble one day. The Northern Counties Permanent Building Society, founded in 1850 as the successor to the Newcastle Land Society, was by reputation ‘a serious establishment’ (one of its first decisions was to ban women from its board, a ruling observed by