Banking

Should you happen to spot me these days lurking outside a Calvin Klein boutique, notebook in hand, I assure you I have a serious purpose. I’m applying the method of the former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who relished statistical minutiae and believed that sales of men’s underpants – an item so out of sight that a chap could readily choose not to replace worn-out ones when he senses an economic pinch ahead – offer a reliable indicator of impending downturns. That’s precisely the sort of trend we need to watch right now, when the Office for Budget Responsibility tells us to expect UK growth at 3.8 per cent

BP will offload the 20 per cent stake in Rosneft, the Kremlin-controlled energy giant, that is the residue of 25 years’ effort to teach true capitalism in Russia. Shell is ditching a deal with Gazprom, the other state oil and gas major, that includes participation in the stalled Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe and an LNG project at Sakhalin in the Russian far east. Western companies in many other sectors will abandon their footholds in Putin’s empire in the coming days. Russia’s one-generation dalliance with the western way of business – as opposed to lawless homegrown kleptocracy – is over. But just because Rosneft pays handsome dividends, let’s

Last month, my bicycle got a flat tyre. ‘Both of those tyres are gonna need replacing and you’ve knackered your sprockets,’ huffed the bike man. The bill came to £230. It’s the kind of irritating expense that means I run out of beer money a week before payday. I’ve always assumed I’m a reasonably normal spender. Work pays me, the money gradually disappears over the month, with hopefully a bit left over for my Isa. I’m vaguely aware that something exists called a ‘credit card’, but my parents always made clear to me that if you don’t have the money for something, don’t buy it. Where I differ from older

The market emphatically endorsed my negative opinion of the Deliveroo share offer, which bombed from its offer price of 390p to close at 282p before Easter. The biggest London IPO since the commodity giant Glencore went public in 2011 now also stands as the most embarrassing flop in living City memory. Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Cazenove, the deal’s bookrunners, must have known it was in jeopardy when they knocked more than a billion off their first indicative valuation after UK institutional investors lined up to say they wouldn’t touch it. But 70,000 Deliveroo app users, having failed to read that signal, bought into the ‘community offer’ — and have

Historians of unforeseen crises talk about ‘chaos theory’ and the ‘butterfly effect’, in which a small perturbation far away — the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Australia, as it were — have impacts across much larger connected systems. More usually applied to weather events, the theory had its 2008 moment when the collapse of AIG, a US insurer whose name meant little over here, threatened to cripple so many banks that, without immediate bailouts, our high street ATMs (we were told) might have been switched off there and then. Let’s hope Greensill Capital, a little-known ‘shadow bank’ created by former Queensland sugar farmer Lex Greensill, doesn’t turn out to

Not so long ago Monzo could do no wrong. Its hot coral debit card made it a must have accessory for urban millennials and it quickly attracted millions of customers. But the golden child of UK Financial Technology (FinTech) has had a bruising year. Is it experiencing the kind of growing pains we should expect after such a meteoric rise? Or has this banking unicorn transformed into a lame donkey? Having never turned a profit, Monzo now faces questions about its future direction; its annual report released in July really set alarm bells ringing. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, its primary source of revenue – a 0.2 per cent interchange fee

Innovative, transparent, simple, easy, fair, open, helpful, honest, smart and caring. These are the top ten words customers use when describing Monzo’s culture on Smart Money People. It comes as little wonder then that since launching in 2015, Monzo has picked-up some two million current account customers, is valued at two billion pounds, and now has its sights set on cracking America. Young Brits have flocked to Monzo, and its bright coral card, in their droves, because carrying around a Monzo card is cool. Gimmicks like a rumoured £70 metal card which confers no additional benefits other than looking good in your hand as you pay for your chai latte,