Edie Lush endures a ‘Win Investing’ seminar which fails in its promise to reveal the secrets of stock-market success ‘What percentage of ten trillion pounds do you need to be happy?’ asks the young Australian called Jonathan who is instructing the ‘free’ Win Investing seminar I’m attending. You may have heard Win Investing’s irritating ads
Peter Hain says two thirds of City bonuses should be redirected to charity, or employers who dish them out should face tax penalties. David Cameron is trying to find a formula to suggest he disapproves of City greed while signalling that the City need fear no tax-grab from him. Those who find the disparity between
If I wanted to pick an artist whose work and mind seem peculiarly apt for the present day, my choice would fall on Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516), the Netherlandish master who specialised in moralising fantasies and diablerie. The world we live in is characterised by unchecked and unpunished, widening and deepening evil, manifesting itself in
Ghosts are fashionable just now. There are two productions of Ibsen’s play and a movie. At dinner parties, if conversation falters or begins to move down forbidden (by me) tramlines, I ask, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Instantly there is a babble. Nobody believes in ghosts personally. But everyone knows somebody who does, and provides
When Win Bischoff and his colleagues Robert Swannell and David Challen threw a party last month to celebrate 100 years of working together at Schroders and Citigroup, it was quite a bash. Not only did it draw the cream of FTSE-100 chiefs — Sir Chris Gent, Sir Nigel Rudd and Stuart Rose, to name just
Not many people seem to realise this, but it’s cheaper in the long run to buy a solid carved mahogany antique chest of drawers than a modern pine one from Ikea. Without having to search far, you can get a beautiful Victorian chest of drawers in excellent condition for £200 which will last you and
‘Blunkett Is Blind’ screamed a pertinent piece of graffiti in Sheffield city centre in the 1980s. This wasn’t just a statement of the bleeding obvious, as a London cabbie might say, but a condemnation of David Blunkett’s stewardship as leader of Sheffield City Council for the seven years before he became MP for Sheffield Brightside
Mark Benton is quite clear why he followed his father into working for Rolls-Royce; after three years toiling away as a roofer, he discovered that ‘it’s nice and warm in here…. Oops, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that.’ Benton, 28, born and bred in Derby, rushes to add that he’s better paid, has had five
Councils the length and breadth of Britain are smelling the money Red Ken is making and talking of introducing congestion-charging schemes. Interest groups are starting to complain at the introduction of yet another tax on motoring. But there are better models than Ken’s, which could bring real benefits. Charging for road use is hardly a
We’re barely ten seconds into our interview when Jeremy Grantham, one-time bedpan salesman from Doncaster, now hugely successful US money manager, is off on a favourite tack — mixing it with his competitors in the investment world. In this case what has drawn his ire are some reported comments from a well-known American fund manager
It is exactly 20 years next week since British Airways was privatised. Arguably, it was the most successful of all the Thatcher-era privatisations. Under the redoubtable Lord King and his marketing-wizard sidekick Colin (now also Lord) Marshall, a demoralised, loss-making state enterprise had been turned by five years of vigorous, not to say brutal, leadership
The novelist James Clavell must have purchased a job lot of clichés when he wrote his two fictional blockbusters based on the history of the Hong Kong-based Jardine Matheson business empire. Noble House is set in the modern era, but it is Taipan, set in the 19th century, that is the more notorious of the
It was Ronald Reagan who warned that ‘inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man’. Having just worked out that my personal rate of inflation is running at a scary 6.6 per cent, I know exactly what he meant. A few months ago
‘This is a celebration of the nerd in each of us,’ declared Partha, the pony-tailed co-founder of Mindtree, an information technology consulting firm, flashing a nervous grin at thousands of young software engineers ranged in a marquee in front of him and going on to read out a dictionary definition: ‘an unstylish, unattractive, or socially
Justin King feels underappreciated. Dubbed ‘Tigger’ by his staff shortly after arriving as chief executive of a crisis-ridden J Sainsbury Plc in March 2004, the 45-year-old’s normal bounce is notably absent when we meet at the grocery chain’s Holborn Circus headquarters to discuss his progress in ‘making Sainsbury’s great again’. Sales over the 12-week Christmas
For fund managers who specialised in Japan, 2005 was a fantastic year. After more than a decade of dealing with a market in the doldrums they suddenly found themselves in the middle of a boom: stocks were rising fast, gurus around the world were tipping Japan as their favourite market and Japanese-themed hedge funds were
An entry in the new edition of Who’s Who isn’t quite like a knighthood — you can’t buy one, for a start — but it is nevertheless a distinction. It’s also a useful indicator of trends. Business leaders appearing in the big red book for the first time this year illustrate the march of international corporate life:
It is good news that Longfellow is at last enjoying a revival, happily coinciding this year with the 200th anniversary of his birth. He is far and away America’s greatest poet. In his own time this was the general verdict on both sides of the Atlantic, and critical approval joined with popular success. His narrative
If you ever happen to find yourself teaching an economics class at a private school, here’s a question you could write on the blackboard. Which industry manages to keep pushing up its prices faster than inflation, and expanding its market share at the same time? The answer is the one you’re in: private education. In
New Orleans always had a split personality. There was the picture-postcard city that visitors enjoyed: lovely, languid, funky, obsessed with food and music and bon temps, in the local parlance. Then there was workaday New Orleans, home to poverty that would have shocked the rest of America and the developed world if they had seen