Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
How bad can it be? Predictions for 2023 have been universally miserable. Even if inflation and interest rates stop rising, there’s no pundit out there who believes consumers, homebuyers, investors or business owners will be cracking open the Mayerling brut rosé recommended below in 12 months’ time and saying: ‘Phew, that was tough but I
‘The purpose of corporations,’ writes William Magnuson, ‘is, and always has been, to promote the common good.’ That’s a very bold claim in an era when the left is convinced that shareholder-owned limited liability companies (which is what Magnuson means by corporations) largely exist to exploit the customer, the worker and the planet for the
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Welcome to the special Christmas episode of The Edition! Up first: What a year in politics it has been. 2022 has seen five education secretaries, four chancellors, three prime ministers and two monarchs. But there is only one political team that can make sense of it all. The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson, deputy political editor Katy Balls
Half a century ago this week, I left school in Scotland and travelled to Worcester College, Oxford for an interview to read politics, philosophy and economics. I can still picture the trio of scary dons who quizzed me: the grumpy political historian ‘Copper’ LeMay; the deeply obscure philosopher Michael Hinton; and Dick Smethurst, a jovial
Will a price cap on Russian oil sales be a winning move in the Ukraine war? Since the invasion began, Russia has continued exporting crude and refined oil products at barely less than pre-war volumes and at rising prices that have replenished Putin’s coffers. From this week, however, the EU and G7 have imposed a
I can’t read ‘China rocked by protests’ and ‘Zero Covid could be the end of Xi Jinping’s rule’ without recalling 4 May 1989, when I watched chanting students march into Tiananmen Square and overheard the British ambassador Sir Alan Donald declare: ‘There, you see how liberal China is becoming.’ I was a banker back then
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It’s fair to say that the tobacco industry is one of the most controversial ones out there, with the phrase ‘Big Tobacco’ almost a meme, a shorthand for unscrupulous business practices. No wonder then that tobacco companies are trying to remake themselves, companies like Philip Morris International. PMI has a history dating back to the
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As Britons live longer and the population ages, society will soon have to rethink what it means to be of ‘working age’. Training and learning will have to be offered to older age groups who are healthier and more capable of work than their predecessors; while healthcare has room to improve in making sure that
A colourful selection of news items this week seem to have a central thread. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the Theranos fake blood-test venture once valued at $9 billion, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for fraud. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, the collapsed crypto exchange once valued at $32 billion, was holed up in
Note to self: don’t sound smug about the sudden collapse of FTX – the Bahamas-based crypto exchange whose valuation has been zapped from $32 billion to zero – because however much it plays to I-told-you-so instincts about the mug’s game of crypto, the episode may herald a wave of wealth destruction that’s the last thing the
‘Reparations’, much bandied about at Cop27, is a dangerous word. It speaks of an admission of historic guilt, which no one can deny has a place in public discourse. But its intention is to put a punitive price on guilt itself, rather than to advance collaborative work needed to rectify damage that can be traced
Cop27? Me neither. Barring a last-minute call to join Boris Johnson’s Sharm El Sheikh entourage, I’ll be minding my carbon footprint at home. But I’m sorry not to be reporting firsthand from a more controversial Middle Eastern gathering of the global elite: the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, or ‘Davos in the Desert’. A ticket
Let’s hope Tuesday’s partial eclipse of the sun was a good omen for the return of Rishi Sunak to Downing Street, this time as Prime Minister. Understandably, he looked more earnest than triumphant. Business leaders and financial markets gave him a positive welcome but – understandably also after months of turmoil, with huge challenges ahead
I’ve chosen to write about corporate tax rates this week not because they’re the sexiest subject available but because – unlike the government’s frontbench, the value of the pound and the scale of winter fuel bills – they’re unlikely to change dramatically during the shelf-life of this column. An increase in corporation tax from 19
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This week: Harriet Sergeant writes about why ethnicity matters in sexual abuse cases (0:30), Lionel Shriver takes aim at the American university students failing their exams, (8:06), Martin Vander Weyer looks at the latest forecasts for housing prices (17:01), and Philip Patrick thinks Japanese food is overrated (25:19). Produced and presented by Natasha Feroze.
Where next for house prices? Clearly, they’re going down as mortgage rates go up – and my forecast in May that they would shed ‘recent froth’ and then stagnate rather than plunge, has been entirely overtaken by events, or at least by Kwasi Kwarteng’s calamitous ‘fiscal event’ last month. Reverberations from the Chancellor’s debut continue
Headlines about ‘alarm over CreditSuisse’ might be read as a sign of normality in financial news, rather than the reverse. The second-ranked Swiss bank (behind UBS) has slipped on so many banana skins in recent years that, as I wrote in February: ‘I sometimes wonder how and why it survives.’ As a recognised basket-case, its
‘Fury at the City slickers betting against UK plc,’ shouted the Daily Mail on Tuesday, after Monday’s mayhem saw the pound hit an all-time low of $1.03. A more accurate corporate metaphor, though less punchy as headline material, would have been something like this… Activist mavericks seize boardroom control of giant sluggish utility. Novice finance
Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng – keen to sharpen the City’s competitive edge, we’re told – wants to remove the legislative cap, imported from Brussels in 2014, that limits bankers’ bonuses to 100 per cent of their base salary, or up to 200 per cent with shareholder approval. That raises interesting questions. Was the cap a good
At His Majesty’s Treasury, it’s all looking a bit like Year Zero in revolutionary Cambodia. Kwasi Kwarteng’s first act was to sack the respected but ‘orthodox’ permanent secretary Sir Tom Scholar. Now the FT reports the Chancellor ordering underlings to focus ‘entirely on growth’, presumably at the expense of financial discipline. I’m picturing a locked
