My predecessor Christopher Fildes looked at exchange rates through a cocktail glass: three negronis for the Italian lira equivalent of a tenner, good; a $2 martini for £1, even better. That latter ratio applied briefly 30 years ago when, he wrote, the favoured tipple ‘brushed against my lips like an angel’s kiss’. It recurred during
‘The jury’s out’, was Liz Truss’s pert response to the question ‘Macron: friend or foe?’ at last week’s Norwich hustings. ‘I’ll judge him on deeds not words.’ In a video clip of the event you can see a bald bloke in the second row applauding wildly, as if she had just delivered from memory the
Liz Truss says she intends to review the Bank of England’s mandate, which has been fixed as a 2 per cent inflation target since Gordon Brown gave the Bank its independence in 1997. We’re told Governor Andrew Bailey, keen to keep his job, thinks a review is ‘probably the right thing’. But is it? A
How outraged should we be that Saudi Aramco has reported a world-record quarterly profit of $48 billion, representing a giant bonus from the global oil price spike provoked by the war in Ukraine? Well, that’s how the cookie crumbles when you’re sitting on oil reserves so abundant and so easily accessible that your marginal cost
We’ll find out shortly whether official statistics agree with economists surveyed by Bloomberg who say UK GDP probably shrank by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter. But at an uncomfortable moment when we know things can only get worse, looking backwards doesn’t help and nor does holding out hope for a miraculous ‘emergency budget’
‘What’s worse, they’re paying the profits to shareholders,’ said a grey-haired woman ahead of me in the Co-op queue. ‘Bloody shareholders,’ her friend of similar age and class spat back. I guessed they were talking about Centrica, parent of British Gas, which at a time when domestic energy bills are rising 23 times faster than
The government’s ‘cost-of-living tsar’, Just Eat co-founder David Buttress, was appointed last month as a Canutian gesture against the inflation tide. He says his role is to encourage retailers and utilities to offer discount deals that might relieve short-term pain for consumers. But wouldn’t it be good if he also had powers to shame companies
Airports are on my mind, since I’ve just stepped off an on-time early-morning flight from East Midlands to Bergerac – yes, Ryanair, efficient as ever. But what a relief not to be battling through Heathrow, where such anarchy has taken hold that the Civil Aviation Authority and Department for Transport have given chief executive John
‘Black swan’ theory, developed by the writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb, refers to unexpected events that have extreme consequences but are rationalised afterwards by pundits who say ‘That was always going to happen.’ Covid was a big one; Putin’s war on Ukraine another. It’s in the nature of global events that there’s always a dark-feathered disruptor
Is anything anywhere getting noticeably better – economically speaking – or at least less bad? Are commodities and manufactured goods beginning to move more freely, for example, to ease the demand pressures that are stoking inflation? It’s good news that the number of container ships anchored off Los Angeles-Long Beach waiting to unload has fallen
Oxford Street is ‘a dinosaur district destined for extinction’, says Marks & Spencer boss Stuart Machin – whose plan to replace its ‘flagship’ Marble Arch store with a new ten-storey retail and office block has been referred to a public inquiry by Michael Gove as Housing Secretary, despite winning approval from Westminster council. Machin points
Here I go again, in my occasional role as your intrepid transport correspondent. Last week I reported on airport chaos, last month on the opening of the Elizabeth line. Now here I am boldly defying the rail strike on a Grand Central train from York to King’s Cross. To be honest, on a perfect sunny
Stock markets are tumbling, but given the tide of economic news, that’s hardly surprising. The S&P 500 index dived into bear market territory – 20 per cent down since January – after a rise in US inflation for May. Our own FTSE indices reacted badly to an unexpected 0.3 per cent drop in UK GDP
After the Jubilee dream of a lovely lost Britain, back to reality with a face-slap: the reality of the £8 pint of beer, the £8-plus gallon of diesel and the death throes of a Downing Street regime that has no discernible answers to the cost-of-living crisis. All of which takes me back to some questions
I sincerely hope you’re not reading this on a holiday flight that’s sitting on the tarmac with no indication as to when it might take off – or a sad train home after your flight was suddenly cancelled. Brace for three-hour delays at security, we’re told; don’t even try checking bags in, and at worst,
It’s 8.16 on Tuesday morning and I’m actually writing this on a moving Elizabeth line train. Moving in the sense that we’ve just zipped from Paddington to Liverpool Street in 13 minutes – which if nothing else will be a boon for City commuters from west of London. Moving also in the sense that I’ve
‘Forecasting is a mug’s game’ is a truism attributed to everyone from fantasy author Douglas Adams to former Bank of England governor Mervyn King. It reminds us that commentators should never be smug when they call the near future right, or quick to crow at others who turned out to be wrong. I may have
Would Andy Haldane, the economist who left the Bank of England to run the Royal Society of Arts, have made a better governor than Andrew Bailey? You might be thinking that Daffy Duck would have made a better fist than Bailey of combatting the cost of living crisis. But seriously, Haldane was an outsider (backed
BP’s ‘underlying’ first-quarter profit of $6.2 billion, compared with $2.6 billion in the first quarter of 2021, was a direct reflection of the surge in global energy prices. Coming 48 hours before polling day, it also looked like a gift-wrapped on-time delivery for Sir Keir Starmer and his claim that a windfall tax on ‘excess’
Anecdotes and statistics should never be confused, but let’s do just that to build a composite picture of today’s UK economy. As the ‘cost of living crisis’ – barely out of its starting blocks – began to eat spending power and erode confidence, high street sales fell 1.4 per cent in March while non-store retail
