Martin Vander Weyer

How bad can it be? Predictions for 2023 have been universally miserable. Even if inflation and interest rates stop rising, there’s no pundit out there who believes consumers, homebuyers, investors or business owners will be cracking open the Mayerling brut rosé recommended below in 12 months’ time and saying: ‘Phew, that was tough but I feel great about 2024, so pull my cracker and I’ll put my paper hat on.’ And I’m not here to buck the trend. We’re in for a long haul of budgets squeezed and projects deferred. Let me nevertheless rebut one doom strand with a plea for common sense, provoked by a Telegraph piece headed: ‘Why house prices will nosedive in 2023… Property experts predict a plunge as buyers are priced out and sellers panic.

Half a century ago this week, I left school in Scotland and travelled to Worcester College, Oxford for an interview to read politics, philosophy and economics. I can still picture the trio of scary dons who quizzed me: the grumpy political historian ‘Copper’ LeMay; the deeply obscure philosopher Michael Hinton; and Dick Smethurst, a jovial left-leaning economist, in and out of Downing Street in Harold Wilson’s years, later a popular provost of the college. It was Smethurst who kicked off with ‘What makes you mad?’, to which I gave the 1972 equivalent of a full-woke answer about human injustice – though the truth, then and now, is that I’m rarely moved to anger; more often to quizzical regret, whether at financial folly, executive greed or state incompetence.

Will a price cap on Russian oil sales be a winning move in the Ukraine war? Since the invasion began, Russia has continued exporting crude and refined oil products at barely less than pre-war volumes and at rising prices that have replenished Putin’s coffers. From this week, however, the EU and G7 have imposed a ban on seaborne Russian crude imports and a $60-per-barrel price cap to be enforced by banning western shipping and insurance firms from handling Russian shipments sold above the price cap. But as I write, $60 is actually the market price of Urals crude – which has lately been trading at 25 per cent below Brent crude – so the cap won’t make much immediate difference to Moscow.

I can’t read ‘China rocked by protests’ and ‘Zero Covid could be the end of Xi Jinping’s rule’ without recalling 4 May 1989, when I watched chanting students march into Tiananmen Square and overheard the British ambassador Sir Alan Donald declare: ‘There, you see how liberal China is becoming.’ I was a banker back then and had just visited the People’s Bank of China to discuss its appetite for investing in UK government debt – having flown up from Hong Kong, where business was booming under the reassurance that the British-run outpost’s way of life would remain unchanged for 50 years after the forthcoming handover to Beijing.

A colourful selection of news items this week seem to have a central thread. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the Theranos fake blood-test venture once valued at $9 billion, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for fraud. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, the collapsed crypto exchange once valued at $32 billion, was holed up in the Bahamas awaiting extradition to face US justice. Despite continuing crypto mayhem, Binance – the Cayman-based rival exchange that declined to rescue FTX – announced the auction of ‘seven animated NFT statues’ celebrating the triumphs of footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.

Note to self: don’t sound smug about the sudden collapse of FTX – the Bahamas-based crypto exchange whose valuation has been zapped from $32 billion to zero – because however much it plays to I-told-you-so instincts about the mug’s game of crypto, the episode may herald a wave of wealth destruction that’s the last thing the financial world needs when there’s already so much bad stuff going on. Still, smugness is a strong temptation here – and what could be more provoking of that sentiment than a photograph in the Daily Telegraph of Sir Tony Blair and Bill Clinton on an FTX-badged stage alongside the firm’s 30-year-old founder Sam Bankman-Fried in his shorts and scruffy trainers?

‘Reparations’, much bandied about at Cop27, is a dangerous word. It speaks of an admission of historic guilt, which no one can deny has a place in public discourse. But its intention is to put a punitive price on guilt itself, rather than to advance collaborative work needed to rectify damage that can be traced back to bad acts, whether committed through greed, prejudice, aggression or ignorance. It says, in short: ‘Don’t send us your supposedly superior expertise and your lectures about how to improve ourselves. Just send cash. And keep sending it until your tortured conscience is assuaged.’ But in relation to climate impacts, the argument over who pays, who receives and how much would rage for decades while the damage gets worse and the repair costs rise.

Cop27? Me neither. Barring a last-minute call to join Boris Johnson’s Sharm El Sheikh entourage, I’ll be minding my carbon footprint at home. But I’m sorry not to be reporting firsthand from a more controversial Middle Eastern gathering of the global elite: the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, or ‘Davos in the Desert’. A ticket to Cop27 is a virtue signal in itself. But attendance at last week’s FII, an annual showcase for progressive sovereign spending within Mohammed bin Salman’s otherwise medieval Saudi state, is a moral conundrum.

Let’s hope Tuesday’s partial eclipse of the sun was a good omen for the return of Rishi Sunak to Downing Street, this time as Prime Minister. Understandably, he looked more earnest than triumphant. Business leaders and financial markets gave him a positive welcome but – understandably also after months of turmoil, with huge challenges ahead – rather a tentative one. Ten-year gilt yields dropped from a panic-driven 4.5 per cent to a still worried 3.8 per cent, double their recent lows; the pound blipped up, then settled back to its recent benchmark of $1.13. A ‘dullness dividend’ is what money men are hoping for, we’re told, after Johnson’s narcissistic inattention and the crackpot Truss-Kwarteng entr’acte.

I’ve chosen to write about corporate tax rates this week not because they’re the sexiest subject available but because – unlike the government’s frontbench, the value of the pound and the scale of winter fuel bills – they’re unlikely to change dramatically during the shelf-life of this column. An increase in corporation tax from 19 per cent to 25 per cent, originally announced by Rishi Sunak, will go ahead in April, despite new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s own leadership campaign pledge to cut the rate to 15 per cent, which would have placed the UK between Ireland and Singapore in competitive tax tables. The uplift will, we’re told, tip £19 billion (based on HMRC’s reckoner of £3.