Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
Stoical and fatalistic, the Japanesenational character will rise to the challenge When I was a banker in Tokyo in the mid 1980s, it was my occasional pleasant task to tour the provinces visiting local banks which kept sterling accounts in London. I had nothing to sell, but my colleagues and I carried bags full of
Has Mervyn lost touch with reality? No, but the City has lost its moral compass Mervyn King’s interview with Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph, in which the governor of the Bank of England accused the financial sector of exploiting gullible customers, gambling with other people’s money, lacking a moral compass, paying themselves excessively and
Freezing tyrants’ assets is easy, but how much will we send back to Tripoli? ‘Queen freezes Gaddafi family assets’ says a headline. That’ll teach the unhinged Libyan dictator to compare himself to our blessed monarch, as he did in one of his recent rants. But for all the spin about an emergency Privy Council meeting
More women in the boardroom? Never mind the equality, watch the performance Successful businesswomen may scoff at the proposal of quotas for women in boardrooms — and many men will dismiss it as Euro-correctness gone mad (see Matthew Lynn, page 17). But I suggest that anyone who hopes to collect a private pension should welcome
Another reason to cut bankers’ pay: the softer the product, the easier the job Is it harder to run a country or a global company? Variations of this dinner- party gambit cropped up wherever I went last week, offering a way of drawing together half a dozen business stories and political arguments. So here’s this
Which would you rather save – your local library or a County Hall paper-pusher? What a curious double life I lead. Half the week I’m your disembodied commentator from the world of high finance — my anonymity protected, as I truffle for City gossip, by a portrait drawing that (I’m told) doesn’t look like me
Privatising forests must be a sensible policy if so many celebs are against it The more passionate the outcry against the government’s plan to privatise its English forestry estate, the more I feel the urge to cash in my meagre investments and bid for one of the forests in question myself. For a start, any
Interim findings from my Really Independent Commission on banking reform The Warden of All Souls, Sir John Vickers, has revealed the outlines of what he thinks about banking reform, so perhaps the Warden of Any Other Business — that’s me — should do likewise. Vickers, a former Bank of England economist, is chairman of the
It’s business, Russian-style – and let’s hope it’sthird time lucky for BP’s Bob Dudley ‘It was just business, Russian-style.’ That was how Bob Dudley described to me his experience in 2008 of having to manage the TNK-BP joint venture in Siberia by email from a secret location in Central Europe — because BP’s Russian partners
Rising petrol prices and the death of Nigel increase my sense of foreboding I returned from a New Year expedition to the Dordogne laden with wine, walnuts and a deep sense of foreboding — not provoked by the mood of rural France, which felt unchangingly placid, but by what I’ve been reading and hearing about
A knighthood for the last banker who put his shareholders’ interests first The New Year honours list is always a vivid indicator of the times just gone by. No brand better encapsulated the feelgood consumer frenzy of the last decade than Lush, the purveyor of organic soaps and Fairtrade lotions alongside campaigns to save sharks
In the land of my Flemish forefathers, I draw a key lesson for 2011: always have a Plan B To Ghent, in the land of my ancestors, to address a conclave of ‘risk managers’. Though the mother tongue of most participants is Dutch or French, the conference is in English — and I feel obliged to
From elections to ash clouds, 2010 was a year that taught us to expect the unexpected This was a year of predictable trends and unpredictable events. It was predictable that the UK would limp out of recession behind France, Germany and the US, and a reasonable bet both that we would avoid a double dip
Why the Governor is in the soup — and how I got the soup into the Governor I’m no WikiLeaker, but I am prepared to reveal that I have, on two occasions, lunched à deux with Professor Mervyn King in his private dining room at the Bank of England. Not a single word of what
What Ireland lacks now are statesmen who can make the case that recovery is possible The screen at Manchester airport tells me I’m about to board an Aer Lingus flight to Dublin, but there’s a Lufthansa plane at the gate. ‘Blimey,’ I mutter, ‘this bailout’s moving fast.’ I’m looking at the wrong gate, however, and
My tip for enterprise tsar from Cameron’s list of loads-of-money peers: Lord Fellowes of Downton Who, I wonder, will advise David Cameron on entrepreneurship now that Lord Young of Graffham has been fed to the sharks by the Downing Street crew for his unguarded remark that in this ‘so-called recession… most people have never had
Caught between EU politicking and market sharks, the Irish deserve sympathy not scorn My sympathies are with the Irish as they find themselves being shoved towards an EU bailout which they regard as a loss of hard-won sovereignty — and it’s pointless to go on scoffing at their earlier eagerness to enjoy the low euro
Disappointed, discouraged – but American optimism will soon start to return Philadelphia ‘We should always love America, not for its leaders — who generally turn out as disappointing as our own — but for its vitality, its collective belief in the possibility of renewal.’ That’s what I wrote from Los Angeles, exactly two years ago,
Change is coming to the City – but let’s notget excited about a tacky shopping centre One New Change sounds like an unambitious and probably tautologous political slogan, but it’s actually a postal address. New Change is a cut-through from Cheapside to Cannon Street, ‘Change’ in this context being an old version of Exchange, as
I was acting and directing at Helmsley Arts Centre last week, in a little piece of ‘café theatre’ performed in the bar to an audience of only 50. But it was a sell-out every night and, I hope, a light-hearted distraction for the citizens of my Yorkshire town from all that gloomy talk about cuts,