New York No helicopters are flying in the cold clear skies above Liberty Street, home of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, from which I assume that monetary policy is in neutral. If money were running short, Ben Bernanke, successor-designate to Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Fed, would be prepared to contemplate an
I have long thought that Alan Greenspan would have made a passable Dalai Lama. Those gnomic utterances, that air of inner calm, that instant access to a deep well of understanding…. The faithful have come to accept that the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Board is the embodiment of power and wisdom, and
The results tell their own story: Tony Blair 3, Conservative party 0; Tony Blair 0, Rodney Leach 3. As David Cameron and David Davis wrestle for the tattered armband which has already passed from captain to captain three times in eight years, they should ask themselves if they are in the right league. Their apparently
An actuary’s life is more fun than it looks. You can make everyone’s flesh creep. Tell them all that their pensions are about to disappear into a black hole. Only the other day some financial astronomers measured the hole at a negative £130 billion and caused a most satisfactory flap. Could our pension funds really
Boots, Boots, Boots, Boots, moving up and down again — no discharge in the war …. Just another change of strategy and an alliance with Alliance. Perhaps it will work better than in-store chiropody. Salients have come and gone, casualties mount, the line is rectified, and commanders succeed one another like British generals in the
His party hoped that Kenneth Clarke as Chancellor would deliver the elusive ‘feelgood factor’ that would somehow win them the election. When would it come through? ‘2 May 1997,’ he told them. He was right. The election was held and lost on 1 May, his successor got off to a flying start, and the factor
The long line of young women outside Marks & Spencer, arms folded modestly across their chests as they wait for their brassieres to arrive, is a standing rebuke to the European Single Market. Even Peter Mandelson, now installed as commissioner in charge of trade, is talking of a glitch. It is, in fact, the by-product
It is all the fault of the fairy who came, uninvited, to Gordon Brown’s christening. Beside the scowling infant’s Moses basket, his godparents’ gifts of industry and ambition were assembled when this glittering creature approached him with a parcel of her own. ‘See, little man,’ she told him, ‘I’ve brought you the great gift of
To put the lunatics in charge of the asylum makes admirable sense. They are the market for its services. They know where the straitjacket pinches. The Commissioner in Lunacy may think that he knows better, but the sum total of their knowledge must be more than he, cocooned in some distant office, could conceivably deploy.
We need a fund for the preservation of financial monuments. Sir Nicholas Goodison — successively chairman of the Stock Exchange, the TSB and the National Art Collections Fund — would be just the man to head it. My fund would have saved Cazenove for the nation, and could now get a second chance with a
We should all be in the banknote business. It’s a licence to print money. The Bank of England made £1,618 million out of it last year, and paid every penny of this over to the Treasury, as required by Sir Robert Peel’s Bank Charter Act of 1844. Senior figures in the Bank have long believed
Something was missing from Marks & Spencer’s shareholders’ meeting. It was the man from the Pru, standing up to propose a vote of thanks. This used to be one of the City’s most regular fixtures. Neither M&S nor the Prudential are quite the forces they were, but in those days the Pru was M&S’s biggest
Risk assessment is the mantra of our time. You cannot organise a girls’ school hockey match without having to assess the risk that the combatants will bark their knuckles. The baskets of flowers that used to hang outside the Ring of Bells pub in Norton Fitzwarren have been assessed as a risk to passers-by who,
Meetings can be a substitute for work, and an expensive one, at that, which is why the thrifty bankers at HSBC had a rule about them. A note had to be kept of every meeting, and the last line of the note would read, ‘This meeting lasted for one hour and 33 minutes and is
Apologies for absence. I was, indeed, away last week — in airports, in limousines, in meeting rooms booked under false names in secluded hotels, and in the engine-rooms of my financial advisers, urging the number-crunchers on. Secrecy was of the essence, as with all coups, and there can have been few so dramatic as this
Nothing clears the air like a really good family row. Funerals can bring them on. Cousins and aunts, wives and husbands, even, say what they have long since thought and then think of something else to say. What with the nasty accident to Europe’s constitution, and the dawning recognition that the single currency may follow
The Prime Minister likes the idea of making poverty history. It gives him the chance to forget about Europe and think about Africa. Bob Geldof and his band can know that the lead singer of Ugly Rumours will be with them in the spirit, and so will any number of marginal voters who never warmed
There has to be a first time for everything, and now the French have taken my advice. ‘Allez France’, so I urged them last week, ‘votez Non, votez souvent’ — and they did. Offered Europe’s new constitution on a plate with lettuce round it, they sent it straight back like a grounded soufflé. Now I
Here we are at the moment of truth, if such a term can be applied to a French referendum. Last time round, the result was swung by boxes of Oui votes flown in from France’s ex-colonies. This time la France outre-mer has been deluged with money from Brussels. (Where does Brussels get the money? Where
A Scottish accountant has his own way of injecting the fear of God into his hearers. This must be one reason why Douglas Flint is finance director of HSBC, and made him the natural choice when his fellow accountants at Cima wanted someone to lecture on pensions. On the day, he came right up to