Any other business

Why can’t British builders be more like the Poles?

Over the past 20 years or so, I have found myself almost continuously on the client side of building contracts, large and small, domestic, corporate and charitable, in four different countries: Britain, France, Hong Kong and Japan. It is an activity in which optimism is rarely justified by experience: builders the world over tend habitually

How to stay sane when computers go crazy

‘I’m on the beach with my BlackBerry,’ a senior banker told the Financial Times back in early August. ‘Normally, banks run on half or two thirds of normal staff in August, which can make it difficult, so every banker has to remain vigilant, even if you’re on the beach like me.’ But, at precisely the

Don’t put your money under the mattress

Extreme stock market volatility and the crisis at Northern Rock have prompted some crass comment about how to look after savings in uncertain times like these. Probably the worst is the glib recommendation, so often trotted out during a panic, that you might as well keep your money under the mattress. But the only people

The asset that shines in troubled times

John Stepek says the price of gold is a gauge of investment fear — and there’s a lot of fear around right now Last week, we had a power cut. It was already pitch-dark outside — not the best time to discover that the children had hidden our only torch. We stumbled about in the

James Delingpole

A good share is like a good wife

James Delingpole admits to ‘utter crapness’ as an investor in the past, but thinks he now has a winning strategy It has been over a year since I checked my share portfolio but when I did the other day I had the most pleasant surprise. Apparently, despite understanding next to nothing about the workings of

Riches from oily rags

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

They sang ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ as the Titanic went down

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,

Martin Vander Weyer

Another mistake by Brown

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

A chastened City

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

A symbol of change – but is she the real thing?

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

Penguin’s irrational exuberance

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.

Find another planet and plant it with soybeans

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

Who’s eating my favourite lizards on Lake Como?

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,

The Tories no longer understand the City

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

Northern Rock: morally hazardous

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 new senior partner sets out his stall

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