Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
Sir Mervyn King was his own man to the end: professorial, downbeat, against the tide. At last week’s Mansion House dinner — as in his final vote in favour of more QE, on which his Monetary Policy Committee colleagues bade him farewell by defeating him six to three — he was still worrying about a
Quite a spell of bowling from the Chancellor last week, skittling Stephen Hester’s stumps at RBS and causing Paul Tucker of the Bank of England to walk even before the new Canadian umpire had time to raise his finger. The kindest thing to be said about Hester’s innings (enough of the cricket already) is that
When a politician’s speech is spun ten days in advance, you know there’s trouble behind the scenes. Next week’s Mansion House dinner will be seen by City attendees principally as a farewell to Sir Mervyn King — and journalists present (including your columnist) will be timing the ovation to see how it compares with Eddie
‘UK shale Eldorado just off the M62’, declared the Financial Times, reporting a huge gas find below Cheshire. Shale gas is natural gas trapped in beds of underground shale; it can be released by hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’, which means pumping water, sand and chemicals into the shale under high pressure. That much we know
Great news on the fracking front. A company called IGas says it’s sitting on a huge shale gas reserve deep below Cheshire. Given the company’s ‘most likely’ estimate of 102 trillion cubic feet of gas, and a potential extraction rate of around 15 per cent, that could fulfil five years of UK gas demand, which
On my way to chair a town meeting, I was chuckling over Phillip Warner’s cartoon last week headed ‘Mary Portas reinvigorates the High Street’. First, TV’s sharp-tongued queen of retail holds forth in front of a row of abandoned shops; then townsfolk dance in the street at the news that she has ‘buggered off in
‘You are a company that says you “do no evil”,’ Margaret Hodge told Google’s Matt Brittin a fortnight ago, ‘I think that you do do evil.’ It was a soundbite of the kind we’ve come to expect from grandstanding select committee chairmen. Since then — I won’t labour the point — we’ve seen an example
Phyllis has gone to Tottenham Court Road, but Ada is having a day off. In fact she’s slumbering deep below us, just south of Bond Street station with her head under Grays Antique Centre. Phyllis and Ada are twin sisters, 140 metres long, weighing 1,000 tonnes each. I’m imagining them as domesticated versions of those
I haven’t used Yahoo as a general search engine since an American friend introduced me to the miracle that was Google in November 2000, but I do use Yahoo Finance for share price data, and the clunky BT Yahoo email service. All this points me to one conclusion: Yahoo is as middle-aged as I am,
When the Manchester-based Co-operative Bank was announced last July as the buyer of 632 Lloyds branches, tripling the size of its own network, I hailed the news as a step forward for ‘banking biodiversity’. In February, George Osborne was still praising the deal, codenamed Project Verde, as one that would ‘shake up the established players’.
You may have gathered from last week’s column that I’ve been cruising the Med in search of fresh subject matter. It’s the sort of cruise that includes a programme of lectures, and the star turn on that front has been the Bishop of London, Dr Richard Chartres, enjoying a change of pulpit after his much-praised
This column comes to you from the cruise ship Minerva in the Greek port of Piraeus. Why I’m aboard is a story for another day — and let me admit up front that, as financial-crisis reportage goes, observations provoked by a Homeric vista of islands and cocktails on the poop deck are unlikely to match
Economists should always leave themselves a margin for error. When challenged that free-market policies on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s led straight from boom to bust, Milton Friedman argued that problems arose not when politicians applied his prescriptions too dogmatically, but because they only ever did so half-heartedly. John Maynard Keynes, the
Unless you bet your life savings on gold some time in the past three years — after its price had passed on the way up the level to which it has now fallen back — there’s no need to be distressed by headlines about a ‘gold rout’, nor even the prospect of a ‘bear embrace’.
The day Margaret Thatcher died was also the day Britain nearly ran out of gas. In late March, it was reported that stored reserves were down to just two days’ supply. As the cold spell continued, the BBC even reported the names of ships bringing liquefied natural gas from Qatar, each cargo representing six hours’
Unless you bet your life savings on gold some time in the past three years — after its price had passed on the way up the level to which it has now fallen back — there’s no need to be distressed by headlines about a ‘gold rout’, nor even the prospect of a ‘bear embrace’.
‘Margaret had no love for the banks,’ Nigel Lawson wrote in The View from No. 11. The idea that the amoral greed of the City and the banking crisis it fuelled should be blamed on Margaret Thatcher has been much bandied about this week. Let me try to put it in -perspective. In her early
A short stroll from Poultry to the Mansion House offers vistas of the old and new City. The fortress of the Bank of England awaits its new Governor while the Royal Exchange earns its keep, like much of the modern Square Mile, as an upmarket nest of boutiques and eateries. The Lutyens-designed headquarters of the
In their second attempt to clean the Augean stables of Cyprus’s banking system without jeopardising the integrity of the euro, bailout negotiators seem to have heeded most of my advice from last week. After the 36-0 rejection by the Cypriot parliament of a first set of terms that included a levy on all bank deposits,
The Cypriots are the authors of their own misfortune, having turned their banking system into a rackety offshore haven for Russian loot and lent most of the proceeds to Greece. But it was madness on the part of bailout negotiators to shake confidence in banks across the eurozone by trying to impose a levy on