Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
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Five years ago this week, George Osborne as chancellor announced a scheme to place tax revenues from shale gas fracking in Lancashire and Cheshire into a ‘sovereign wealth fund for the north of England’. Soon after that, a leaked memo revealed him urging fellow ministers to intervene with planning authorities to fast-track fracking proposals and
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Mario Draghi, who retired as president of the European Central Bank this week, was arguably the first holder of that office to win international respect for himself and his institution. The ECB’s founding chief, the downbeat Dutchman Wim Duisenberg, was undermined on all sides but especially by the French — who eventually succeeded in replacing
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The first time I was ever commissioned by the Daily Mail, the voice on the phone said: ‘You used to be a banker, you must know all about fraud. Everyone else is saying the SFO is rubbish, so we want a piece that says “We support the fraud fighters”.’ Not my field, I said, and
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When Facebook announced details earlier this year of a global digital currency called Libra — backed by a roll call of other corporate giants — I declared myself a sceptic on the grounds that behind its libertarian sales pitch, the concept was really ‘a power-grab for cash balances and personal data out of the conventional banking
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Minding my own business at 67 Pall Mall — the private members’ club favoured by oenophile West End hedge-fund managers that will serve as this week’s restaurant tip — I’m watching two tieless but well-tailored gents at the next table sampling different vintages of Château Pichon Longueville. And I’m thinking: ‘Bastards! These must be the
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Private secretary: ‘The Bank of England governorship, Prime Minister… opposition MPs have been saying it’s a political stitch-up and calling for the shortlist to be made public. Have you had time to look at the file?’ Boris, distracted: ‘Stitch-up piffle! I thought we’d picked my economist chum Gerard Lyons — very sound on Brexit.’ ‘Treasury
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It’s not obvious that the state has a moral obligation to repatriate holidaymakers whenever a tour operator goes bust, as Thomas Cook did on Sunday night. Being briefly stranded in a sangria-fuelled resort is not like being left behind in a war zone, after all. But when large numbers of tourists are involved such situations
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Another fine lunch and a particularly fine Edinburgh venue for our encounter with finalists for the Scotland & Northern Ireland region of The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor Awards 2019. We’re in the Register Club, inside the Edinburgh Grand Hotel on St Andrew’s Square – a building which happens to have been the headquarters of Royal Bank
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An oil price surge from $60 to $72 per barrel, as happened after the drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq refinery caused a sudden 6 per cent cut to global supply, would once have been taken as a sure signal of economic troubles ahead. A 1990s study of postwar oil prices plotted against employment and
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Long ago in my investment banking days I had a glimpse into the mind of the British Airways long-haul pilot. Chatting to an attendant on a flight from London to Delhi, I let slip what I did for a living. ‘The captain would like a word,’ she whispered a few minutes later. Up in the
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Readers of my weekly ‘Any Other Business’ column know I occasionally find reason or excuse to slip a restaurant tip in amongst the financial commentary. In that spirit, let me start by saluting the venue for our encounter with North-West & Wales finalists for The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2019. This was 20
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Of all the stains on the reputation of UK banks, the PPI scandal is surely the most shameful, the most revealing of low human behaviour and the one with the most far-reaching consequences. Between 1990 and 2010, some 30 million customers were sold Payment Protection Insurance, supposedly designed to cover them if they became unable
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The average FTSE 100 chief executive earned £3.5 million last year — 117 times the £29,574 pay of the average full-time UK worker, according to new figures from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Other sources tell us that at the last count, 54 of those FTSE 100 chiefs were British, 21 held other
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A couple with a first baby sought my advice: they had accepted a low offer for their cramped London flat and bid the asking price for a nice house in commuterland. But they need a bigger mortgage and if Brexit leads to a property crash, they could face negative equity and financial stress. Should they
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It came as no great surprise that the UK economy contracted by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter, following a first quarter in which growth had been artificially boosted to 0.5 per cent by stockpiling ahead of the original 29 March Brexit deadline. It’s fair to claim, as our editorial did two weeks ago,
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This blog comes to you from the library of Hampton Manor, a Victorian mansion deep in the woods somewhere south of Birmingham. And if that sounds like the setting for a game of Cluedo, it isn’t: I’m here to meet three of the Midlands regional finalists for this year’s Economic Disruptor Awards. Our host is
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A wave to the FT team whose weekend feature on how the pound has been hit by fears of no deal began with this arresting sentence: ‘Sterling has finally buckled.’ I almost spilled my café crème as I read that in a sunlit French square and contemplated JP Morgan’s ‘conservative’ forecast of a $1.15 no-deal
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We’re in the elegant City dining room of our sponsor, Julius Baer, hosted by Chief Executive Officer David Durlacher and joined by guest judges for London & the South: venture capitalist Kjartan Rist and serial-entrepreneur-turned-anti-plastic-campaigner Sian Sutherland. Nine regional finalists are with us to talk about their businesses, making for a tight discussion timetable, but
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Talking to entrepreneurs is so much more fun than the endless arguments about Brexit and Boris — the lot of jobbing journalists these days. This blog covers the three London & the South regional finalists for the 2019 Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards who were unable to join us this week for lunch at
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‘Turbocharging’: sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Two weeks ago, I noted that our incoming PM had deployed this power-word — with its subliminal reminder of his pedal-to-the-metal reputation as the former motoring correspondent of GQ — to describe what ‘free ports’ would do to regional economies. Since then, it has clearly been scrawled on Dominic Cummings’s
