Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
Stephen Green — the former trade minister Lord Green of Hurstpier-point, who became this week’s political punchbag— was always a rather Olympian, out-of-the-ordinary figure at HSBC. This was a bank that traditionally drew its top men from a corps of tough, non-intellectual, front-line overseas bankers typified by the chairmen before Green, Sir John Bond and
BP’s profits are down, and the oil giant is slashing up to $6 billion out of its investment plan for the year. At Shell, the cut could amount to $15 billion over the next three years. At troubled BG, still waiting for new chief executive Helge Lund to arrive, capital spending will be a third
The whole idea of capitalism, according to Enlightenment philosophers, was that it created a positive spiral of moral behaviour. ‘Concern for our own happiness recommends us to the virtue of prudence,’ wrote Adam Smith. ‘The profits of commerce,’ according to David Hume, carry us towards a state in which ‘the tempers of men, as well
The only question I remember from my Oxford moral philosophy paper was ‘What is integrity and is it a virtue?’ In the margins of all the politicking that follows the victory of Syriza in the Greek election, I hope someone asks: ‘What is austerity, is it a virtue, and why has it worked in the
The Swiss National Bank usually ticks away as quietly as one of its nation’s more expensive timepieces, but when the cuckoo does occasionally burst out of the clock, all hell breaks loose. After a policy was introduced in September 2011 to depress the Swiss franc against the euro (as traumatised investors continued to pour money
Mixed results for the Brits at the Golden Globes, but I’m pleased to announce that my Golden Monkey Wrench for media manipulation goes to Mick Cash and his team at the Rail Maritime & Transport union, for securing wall-to-wall sympathetic coverage of the collapse of courier firm City Link — some 2,300 of whose workers
Ever since European Central Bank president Mario Draghi declared himself ready, in July 2012, ‘to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro’, the likely disintegration of the single currency — as predicted by pundits such as yours truly over the preceding years — has all but disappeared from the comment agenda. The combination of
You might recall a column I once wrote about a party at the Wallace Collection. It took place in late 2008, the host was the US investment bank Morgan Stanley, and I compared the assembled financiers — who saw the crisis then raging as just one more opportunity to make money out of volatility in
To Brighton, to address a conference of property investors. Unusually, I find myself programmed alongside both Gerard Lyons, City economist turned Mayor Boris’s adviser, who is notably upbeat in his forecast, and Robert Peston, who is distinctly downbeat in an extended after-dinner lecture with graphs, but gets away with it because his voice mannerisms are
This oil price slump is turning into a ‘black swan’: one of those economic events that seem to come from nowhere with strange and unforeseen effects. As Brent Crude dips below $70 a barrel and Opec sits on its hands, major banks face losses on financings for US energy companies that must have looked like
A theme of this autumn has been conversations about corporate reputation and how it is guarded or lost. To name but three, I have kicked this around at a ‘Trust Forum’ sponsored by the lawyers DLA Piper at Oxford’s Said Business School, at a lunch hosted by the wealth managers McInroy & Wood, and in
The first time I checked in to a French hotel with a golden retriever — his name was Gregory, predecessor of the incumbent Douglas — I left him, clearly unhappy, in the bedroom when I went to dinner. Then I realised that every other party already in the dining room included a dog, in some
I’ve written before of a ‘curse of Qatar’ that might explain misfortunes attending the Gulf state’s UK investments, of which the seven-years-delayed Chelsea Barracks redevelopment is an example. I also claim to have coined ‘curse of Canary Wharf’, a phenomenon afflicting not only financial tenants of the Docklands complex but visitors such as Gordon Brown,
I didn’t realise that the Rialto Bridge has a moving walkway and muzak, that the gondolas beneath it float on a clear blue pool, and that the school of Tiepolo had so many apprentices available to paint hotel ceilings. ‘Still in Venice, Martin?’ you’re thinking. ‘Surely that was last month?’ Well no, your intrepid columnist
Michael O’Leary of Ryanair has long been an anti-hero of this column. I loved his airline when it was consistently rude to me as a passenger, because it set benchmarks of ruthless punctuality and rock-bottom fares that shook the whole European airline sector. I was suspicious of the idea that, having exhausted other routes to
This issue includes the new Spectator Money supplement, in which I hope you’ll find a bouquet of stimulating ideas. The cover piece by the enterprise campaigner Michael Hayman waxes lyrical on the important theme of investing in high-tech start-ups: important because it’s an exciting thing to do with the slice of savings on which you’re
Continuing last week’s theme, it was the Italian banks — with nine fails, four still requiring capital injections — that bagged the booby prize in the great EU stress-testing exercise, followed predictably by Greece and Cyprus, while Germany and Austria (with one fail each) fared better than some of us had feared. The most delinquent
This dispatch comes to you from Venice — where I arrived at sunset on the Orient Express. More of that journey on another occasion, I hope. Suffice to say that if you happen to have been wrestling with the moral choice of bequeathing what’s left of your tax-bitten wealth to ungrateful offspring or spending it
Last week’s market tremor, provoked by renewed fears of eurozone stagnation and a slowdown in global growth, was serious enough for IMF chief Christine Lagarde to feel the need to pronounce, in her most soothing tone, that it was ‘maybe at this stage an over-reaction’. But if you were listening to the Today programme on
October is always a turbulent month, and I’m feeling uneasy about this one. The FTSE100 index, which looked set to break through 7,000 in September, has lost more than 500 points since then — and would have lost more but for manoeuvres in the mining sector. Pessimism stalks the bond markets, and even a falling
