Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
From our UK edition
‘It is seldom wise to sacrifice a present evil for a doubtful advantage in the future,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes as a precocious undergraduate in 1904. As we contemplate what no deal might be about to bring, those words seem to confirm the view of his living followers that the sage who died in 1946
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Happy Chinese New Year, or at least let’s hope so. The chubby pig of 2019 is an obvious symbol of wealth; but being both pragmatists and optimists where money is concerned, the Chinese easily find reasons to associate all 12 of their zodiac creatures, (including 2018’s dog) with rising prosperity. This year, however, the amount
Distant thunder rumbles when ‘recession’ creeps back into America’s vocabulary
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Has ‘Jay’ Powell gone wobbly, or does he know something we don’t? That was the question being asked after the US Federal Reserve, of which Powell is chairman, kept dollar interest rates on hold last week — rather than continuing to notch them upwards as it has been doing for two years — and hinted
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Paying tax — which many of us have been doing this week before HMRC’s 31 January deadline — is a citizen’s duty, not an act of virtue. But for the very rich it is also a choice, since with the help of expensive advisers they can duck it or pay very little of it by
From our UK edition
Paying tax — which many of us have been doing this week before HMRC’s 31 January deadline — is a citizen’s duty, not an act of virtue. But for the very rich it is also a choice, since with the help of expensive advisers they can duck it or pay very little of it by
From our UK edition
Nobody who’s anybody is in Davos this week and, as usual, neither am I. World leaders from Donald Trump to Narendra Modi declined to attend the annual super-elite World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps, while the UK was represented chiefly by Sir David Attenborough and a giant Union-Flag banner across the front of the
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Patisserie Valerie, the cake-shop chain that found a potentially fraudulent £40 million black hole in its finances last October, fell into administration today after failing to persuade its bankers not to pull the plug. Chairman Luke Johnson, having lent the company £10 million plus last-minute cash to help pay this month’s wages for 3,000 staff,
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The popular new narrative for the UK auto industry is that its troubles are only temporarily to do with Brexit and much more to do with misguided policies, wrong decisions and economic swings. There’s a sharp decline in demand for luxury models from pinched Chinese consumers, while diesel sales have slumped because regulators continue to
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Transfixed as you were by Westminster chaos, did you also spot the news that Hitachi is about to cancel or suspend construction of the Wylfa nuclear power station in North Wales? The Japanese engineering giant has evidently failed to reach agreement on a guaranteed electricity price and terms for a UK government stake in the
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Against a background of drooping eurozone growth (the consensus forecast is 1.6 per cent this year) I met no one in France who was celebrating the 20th birthday of the euro, despite European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s imaginative toast to it as ‘a symbol of unity, sovereignty and stability [that] has delivered prosperity and protection
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In France after New Year, the only gilets jaunes I spotted were a rather dejected bunch near an autoroute exit. I was ready to give them a cheery thumbs-up rather than risk having my path blocked, but they took no notice of me — and no one I met expressed support for them. The novelty
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A friend reminds me that she sold her house last summer because I warned her 18 months ago that Brexit chaos would loom over every aspect of life by the beginning of 2019. I got that horribly right, and I was right too that the dismissive attitude of Westminster politicians towards the Irish border problem
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Are smartphones fuelling a pandemic of youthful anxiety and depression? That’s the question parents will wrestle with this Christmas as their offspring clamour for the latest Samsung or Huawei. And the answer seems to be yes: these must-have accessories are corroding the nature of human interaction for the next generation — but the young can’t
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There’s been a strong sense of pre-Christmas turkeys coming home to roost in this week’s news, as stories I’ve written about for months or years have reached, if not a denouement, then at least a new twist in the plot. Saddest of these is Crossrail, London’s east-west mass–transit system that was originally scheduled for its
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I wrote last week of my fear that we’ll never ‘take back control of our fish’, as Brexiteers ardently wish, because the rights of UK fishermen — whose diminished industry contributes less than half a per cent of GDP — will be too easy to give away in the next negotiating phase. Sure enough, last
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I listen in despair to Brexiteers’ dismissals of pleas from business for a settlement that allows them to plan beyond March next year. On last Friday’s Any Questions?, Jürgen Maier — who runs the £5 billion manufacturing business that is German-owned Siemens UK, and who may be the most respected industrialist in the north of England —
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The arrest of Carlos Ghosn and the move to oust him as chairman of Nissan in Japan has stunned the auto industry of which he’s a global megastar — serving simultaneously as head of Renault in France, and having bolted together the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance that built more than ten million cars last year. Nissan has
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Los Angeles/Seattle US stocks briefly rallied after the midterm results as markets looked favourably on a divided Congress and the possibility of cooperation between Donald Trump and House Democrats. The Fed kept interest rates on hold until next month, while remarking on strong growth and a continuing fall in unemployment. That, in a nutshell, is
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I dreamed I saw a monster advancing through a devastated town centre, mighty footsteps shaking semi-derelict buildings. I awoke in my armchair to find I had been reading a news item about Sports Direct tycoon Mike Ashley’s latest gambit: buying the 60-shop Evans Cycles chain out of administration for just £8 million, to follow his
