Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
At this juncture, my best credit-crunch advice is to keep beside your armchair at all times an atlas of the world, a modern American dictionary and a bottle of whisky. If your constitution is strong, you might also want a copy of the Financial Times but do keep the television zapper handy, so you can
The ticking parcel I failed to spot and the oil-price prediction I got spot on Last week’s global stock market panic, the overture to this week’s astonishing round of state interventions, was in part provoked by fear of humongous losses in something called ‘credit default swaps’. These arcane inventions by Wall Street rocket-scientists are a
At the historic moment when the House of Representatives passed Hank Paulson’s bail-out bill last Friday night — thus, we must hope, despite early indications to the contrary, significantly improving the world’s chances of avoiding economic cataclysm — I was conducting some research into the Scandinavian solution. I don’t mean the policies followed by the
On Monday afternoon I rang a Wall Street friend who used to work at Lehman Brothers. ‘What’s the mood?’ I asked him. ‘Do you think this is the turning point?’ ‘Hold on a moment,’ he replied. ‘Let me just climb back in off the window ledge.’ There was a pause, then a nervous chuckle. For
The Prime Minister’s survival is pinned on a September ‘relaunch’ to ease the voters’ economic woes. But, says Martin Vander Weyer, each door through which Brown tries to escape his predicament slams in his face. His room for manoeuvre is negligible All this talk of Gordon Brown’s ‘economic recovery plan’ calls to mind the unhappy
Does Medvedev really believe in the rule of law? The fate of TNK-BP is the test Is President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia — who looks and sounds like a liberal-leaning modern technocrat — really his own man, or is he merely the stooge of his predecessor, the sinister, warmongering Vladimir Putin? The mad situation engulfing
Martin Vander Weyer’s thoughts on the world of business Shell and Barclays were the two highest-profile British companies in South Africa during the apartheid era. Both pursued non- racial business practices as far as they could, but both endured years of disrupted shareholder meetings and flak from the student Left. Shell stuck it out —
How times change: the ECB has become the very model of a modern central bank I don’t suppose many of my readers took part in the European Central Bank’s tenth birthday celebrations last week — but if I’m wrong about Jean-Claude Trichet’s taste in columnists, then bon anniversaire, monsieur le président, though I can’t quite
These days, Vesco the fugitive fraudster would have had a top job on Wall Street So farewell, Robert Vesco, the fraudster, drug trafficker and fugitive from US justice whose death last year has been ‘confirmed by Cuban burial records’, according to the Daily Telegraph. Vesco absconded with $200 million of other people’s money — $60
The Chariots of Fire moment that revealed Gordon’s 10p tax timebomb The abolition of the 10p starter rate of income tax in Gordon Brown’s last Budget has a special significance in recent Spectator history: coming only a month after our move from Doughty Street in Bloomsbury to Old Queen Street in Westminster, it was the
Twenty years ago, when I ran the Hong Kong branch of a London investment bank, one of our most important London-based investor clients for Asian stocks was only ever referred to, in whispers, as ‘Orange’. It operated — so I was told — behind unmarked doors somewhere near St Paul’s Tube station; it dealt with
I think I’ve spotted the ‘trash and cash’ merchants, dining at Mayfair’s best tables A posse of hedge fund managers came round to The Spectator the other day, not to indulge in ‘trash and cash’ — or the even less attractive ‘pump and dump’ — but to participate in a breakfast discussion about how they
Anyone who stockpiled their vodka collection ahead of yesterday’s savage increases in alcohol duties will probably be feeling a little rough this morning; and so too will Alastair Darling, I suspect, even if he carried on drinking tap water through the evening, as he did at the despatch box, and confined himself to a bowl
‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963,’ wrote Philip Larkin; consumer debt, with similar connotations of gratification and regret, began in Britain three years later with the launch of Barclaycard, based on the model of the world’s first mass-market credit card, BankAmericard in California, which dated back to 1958. A retired bank manager once told me he
In the end, they may have to auction what’s left of Northern Rock on eBay When the nationalisation of Northern Rock was announced at the beginning of the week, commentators queued up behind the shadow chancellor to declare a return to the dark days of the 1970s and to dance on the ashes of Alistair
Martin Vander Weyer on the next thing to cause heartburn in the financial markets. The current market crisis sometimes feels like a Scrabble championship between financial pundits, in which most of us hesitate to challenge dubious words and strange jumbles of letters for fear of showing ignorance. First came ‘subprime’, which we learned to define
Oh Boy. If you thought the Société Générale saga was beyond belief – today we learn that Eurex, the derivatives exchange, had been trying to warn the French bank for two months about Jerome Kerviel’s extraordinarily large trading volumes – then I invite you to contemplate the £274 million loss clocked up on hedging transactions by
Network Rail’s performance is poor enough to test an archbishop’s patience, writes Martin Vander Weyer The archbishop and I — not having been formally introduced — confined ourselves to an exchange of despairing glances. We were at Doncaster, in the buffet car of the 19.13 from York to King’s Cross, listening to a series of
Since I’m not a Northern rock shareholder, I wasn’t at yesterday’s EGM in Newcastle’s Metro Radio Arena – so I’m grateful to Graeme Wearden on the Guardian’s NewsBlog for a blow-by-blow account of the proceedings. A lot of ‘north-east (hurt?) pride’ was on display, he writes, as well as some natty shirting worn by the
‘Should we blame it all on City spivs?’ I asked a managing director of a famous investment bank at a pre-Christmas party. He had just told me – with the smile of a man who can look forward to yet another seven-figure bonus in a few weeks’ time – that his firm was still doing