Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
The headline business story of the holiday season was the latest bailout of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. This is Italy’s third largest bank and, according to recent ECB ‘stress tests’, Europe’s weakest — regarded by pessimists both as a potential catalyst for systemic collapse and a symptom of deeper Italian problems that could
Most of my predictions for 2016 were wrong; so let’s not revisit them. But I was right, in January, to identify as a theme of the coming year an evident gulf between ‘the reinvigorated and the demoralised’. In small business sectors and provincial towns, as well as in the attitudes of millions of citizen voters
Many (well, several) of you asked me what happened to George, the supermarket chairman who was the anti-hero of my Christmas fable last year. So I tracked him down, somewhere in the provinces, to bring you another episode… ‘Five minutes, Sir George,’ said a young man in black. ‘New boobs OK?’ George nodded, adjusted his
Many (well, several) of you asked me what happened to George, the supermarket chairman who was the anti-hero of my Christmas fable last year. So I tracked him down, somewhere in the provinces, to bring you another episode… ‘Five minutes, Sir George,’ said a young man in black. ‘New boobs OK?’ George nodded, adjusted his
‘We’re going to have not just consumers represented on company boards, but workers as well,’ Theresa May declared in July. ‘I can categorically tell you that this is not about… the direct appointment of workers or trade union representatives on boards,’ she corrected herself in her CBI speech last month. ‘It will be a question
‘We’re going to have not just consumers represented on company boards, but workers as well,’ Theresa May declared in July. ‘I can categorically tell you that this is not about… the direct appointment of workers or trade union representatives on boards,’ she corrected herself in her CBI speech last month. ‘It will be a question
Here’s a pre-Christmas party game. Each player comes up with a word to fill the blank in ‘If Brexit was a …, which one would it be?’, and everyone else has to come up with witty answers. If the word is ‘film’, for example, obvious answers are Independence Day or Death Wish, according to taste,
We’ve all had those moments when the electrician prods a wobbly plug-socket, sucks his teeth and says, ‘Lucky this old wiring hasn’t burned your house down, mate.’ But still, £369 million sounds a big estimate for sorting out Buckingham Palace over the next ten years — unless you recognise that the mansion at the end
Theresa May likes to give a kitten-heeled kicking to conference audiences, even when they are police officers or her own party delegates. But at the CBI gathering at Grosvenor House in London on Monday, she was out to make friends with soothing (if essentially hollow) remarks about Brexit, and promises of the lowest corporate tax
Theresa May likes to give a kitten-heeled kicking to conference audiences, even when they are police officers or her own party delegates. But at the CBI gathering at Grosvenor House in London on Monday, she was out to make friends with soothing (if essentially hollow) remarks about Brexit, and promises of the lowest corporate tax
It’s rare for me to celebrate anyone’s financial misfortune, but if Leonard Cohen had not lost $5 million of his retirement savings due to alleged fiddling by his former manager, he might not have re-embarked on recording and touring in his seventies, and we would have heard much less of that uniquely stirring voice in
Sunday brunch at Hugo’s, a bustling Mexican restaurant with a mariachi band and a multi-ethnic clientele: at the next table, a big Latino family with a happy baby in a high chair. This is a true picture of Houston: only a third of its citizens are white, and only 22 per cent of under-20s; the
Houston, Texas It’s hard to find anyone in polite society here who admits to having voted for Trump, even among the oil men. But 4.7 million Texans did so, giving him 53 per cent of the popular vote. In redneck rural counties the Donald carried four fifths of the ballot, but Hillary Clinton was ahead in
‘I have a horrible feeling he has enough gimmicks to be the wild card… I mean, he could go on to win it.’ We’re just beginning to come to turns with the dangerous tendency of today’s voters to reject the conventional and competent in favour of unqualified, undignified, unlovable candidates who conduct themselves like showmen
There’s an electronic device on my desk that looks — through its bubble- wrap — like a cheap miniature calculator. It’s still in the packaging a month after it arrived because I’m irritated by the idea that I have to master a new gadget specifically designed to complicate a familiar action. The thing is a
For Mark Carney to have returned to-Canada after five years as Governor, as he originally planned, rather than serving until 2021, might by now have looked like a win for his critics — so adding an extra year, up to the end of Brexit talks in 2019, is a sidestep worthy of Strictly. Meanwhile, I
The new series of The Missing is surely the gloomiest television of the year. But it has nothing on the endless saga of RBS, which seems to use the same disturbing time-shift device: whenever there’s a horrible new plot twist, you have to spot whether we’re in 2008, 2011 or today. The crippled bank, still
As the 30th anniversary of Big Bang loomed, I found myself back at the scene of my City demise. Ebbgate House — headquarters of BZW, the investment banking arm of Barclays where I worked until one fateful morning in 1992 — fell deservedly to the wrecking ball a decade ago. It was replaced by Riverbank
As the 30th anniversary of Big Bang loomed, I found myself back at the scene of my City demise. Ebbgate House — headquarters of BZW, the investment banking arm of Barclays where I worked until one fateful morning in 1992 — fell deservedly to the wrecking ball a decade ago. It was replaced by Riverbank
Will Mark Carney go or stay? On appointment in 2013, he indicated he would leave the Bank of England and return to Canada in 2018 (‘We’ll be back in five,’ his wife tweeted), but he has an option to stay a further three years. Theresa May’s criticism of QE in her conference speech was interpreted
