Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
An Uber insider tells me not to write off the ride-hailing giant too soon, because it’s a very smart company for all its faults — and because the numbers of drivers and users for whom it is part of daily life will make it difficult for Transport for London to uphold its licence withdrawal on
It is more than three years since Bank of England governor Mark Carney was accused by Labour MP and Treasury Select Committee member Pat McFadden of behaving like ‘an unreliable boyfriend, one day hot, one day cold’ in his hints about forthcoming interest-rate rises. And it’s more than a decade since the last time the
The price of offshore wind power has halved, making those giant inshore turbine arrays we love to hate look competitive with new nuclear power for the first time. The headline number in this story is £57.50, which is the guaranteed electricity price per megawatt hour bid by two windfarm ventures in the government’s latest ‘contracts
Should we place faith in a survey, conducted in June but published this week, that says London is still the world’s pre-eminent financial centre? Yes, in the sense that no one challenges that long-standing claim as of today; no, in the sense that complacency would be a huge mistake while every financial firm operating in
Am I ready to shell out £1,000 for an iPhone X with its exciting new ‘Face ID’ feature? Of course not. Readers may recall I was keen to take several tech-steps back to the retro Nokia 3310 that was relaunched in March — but when I finally plucked up courage to take my unloved iPhone
Should we place faith in a survey, conducted in June but published this week, that says London is still the world’s pre-eminent financial centre? Yes, in the sense that no one challenges that long-standing claim as of today; no, in the sense that complacency would be a huge mistake while every financial firm operating in
Sir David Tang, who died last week aged 63, was once The Spectator’s distributor in Hong Kong. His special achievement in his later entrepreneurial career was to turn his own stylish tastes in clothes, restaurants, clubs and cigars into a highly personal international brand, and to make it all look like great fun. In many ways
Arguably it was Robert Peston’s breathless reporting of trouble at Northern Rock on the evening of 13 September 2007 that kicked off the crisis. The next morning, depositors were queuing round the block and the drama that would almost bring down the global banking system a year later had begun. Looking back after a decade,
Arguably it was Robert Peston’s breathless reporting of trouble at Northern Rock on the evening of 13 September 2007 that kicked off the crisis. The next morning, depositors were queuing round the block and the drama that would almost bring down the global banking system a year later had begun. Looking back after a decade,
In Houston last November I spent an evening at the city’s industrial-scale food bank, where I heard a presentation on the Houstonian tradition of offering hospitality to refugees, including 200,000 displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. We were also given some positive spin on the strength of co-operation, in time of crisis, between the
Removing all trade and tariff barriers as part of a hard Brexit would generate ‘a £135 billion annual boost to the UK economy’, according to Professor Patrick Minford on behalf of Economists for Free Trade — while those who claim his ideas spell economic suicide are ‘hired hands, they work for government, they work for
The proposed marriage of two mid-sized wealth managers, Rathbone Brothers and Smith & Williamson, has not made City pulses race. But it will create a business with £56 billion under management, following a trend of sector consolidation in search of economies of scale that kicked off with the merger of Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset
Removing all trade and tariff barriers as part of a hard Brexit would generate ‘a £135 billion annual boost to the UK economy’, according to Professor Patrick Minford on behalf of Economists for Free Trade — while those who claim his ideas spell economic suicide are ‘hired hands, they work for government, they work for
The core consumer price index of inflation held unexpectedly steady at 2.6 per cent in July, further removing any possibility of an interest-rate rise this year. So what’s the downside? My eye is drawn to a bulletin from Nationwide, the UK’s most sensible mortgage lender. It reports a fall in quarterly profits after a rise
I can’t work up much indignation at the collapse of London’s Garden Bridge project, which has been strangled by the refusal of mayor Sadiq Khan to guarantee its continuing operational and maintenance costs — assuming its trustees, led by former banker and minister Lord Davies of Abersoch, would have succeeded in raising the £150 million
I can’t work up much indignation at the collapse of London’s Garden Bridge project, which has been strangled by the refusal of mayor Sadiq Khan to guarantee its continuing operational and maintenance costs — assuming its trustees, led by former banker and minister Lord Davies of Abersoch, would have succeeded in raising the £150 million
In a quiet season for business news, the giant cesspit that is the world of elite football can be relied upon to provide a money story with a pungent whiff to it. I refer to the transfer of the 25-year-old Brazilian known only as Neymar from Barcelona to Paris St Germain for a world-record fee
As usual for August, I’m in France, where the news in brief is ‘Euro up, Macron down’. The youthful French president, who swept to power with two-thirds of the second round vote in May, has seen his approval rating plunge to 36 per cent — at the time of writing, 2 per cent worse than
There has just been a rather meaningless debate about whether Jeff Bezos of Amazon or Bill Gates of Microsoft should be labelled ‘the richest man in the world’. Both are notionally worth more than $90 billion, although Bezos was briefly ahead by a nose after a surge in the value of his Amazon shares. It
The question of what kind of border after Brexit will exist between Northern Ireland and the Republic will, I predict, become a very thorny one indeed as negotiations crawl into the autumn. Talk of ‘putting the border in the Irish Sea’ — somehow leaving the north inside the EU for customs and immigration purposes, but
