Four years ago, I wrote that I knew no dark rumours about Santander, the rising force in UK high street banking, but that history taught me banks which expand rapidly and globally ‘always come unstuck in the end… partly because the challenge of risk control across such vast portfolios becomes impossible… Banks that have been
I should declare two connections before I start offering opinions about the latest US judgment against BP relating to the ‘Macondo’ disaster — the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and subsequent spillage in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The first is that I’m occasionally invited to interview BP executives for its in-house magazine.
Hats off to Rona Fairhead, the former Financial Times executive who will succeed Lord Patten as chairman of the BBC Trust. It requires a brave spirit to take on this poisonously politicised role — and Fairhead starts with the disadvantage that everyone thinks they know the roll call of candidates who might have been preferred
European Central Bank President Mario Draghi secured a place in history by his demonstration, on 26 July 2012, of the power of words in a financial crisis. Not long in office, he had already shown willingness to act firmly, averting a liquidity crunch by providing three-year lending facilities for European banks. That day, he told
The FTSE100 index stands precisely where it did in the first week of December 1999. Whichever way you look at it, shareholders — including pension funds — have had a rotten run on the economic rollercoaster of the past 15 years. So it’s reasonable to keep asking whether the rise in executive pay over that
August is the season for conversation about career choices. Every holiday party seems to include new graduates or next year’s graduands in need of grown-up advice. Many yearn to be pastry chefs, having devoted their student years to watching The Great British Bake Off. Some want to be journalists, and I tell them it’s more
Iain Conn, who will succeed Sam Laidlaw as chief executive of Centrica, would have been a dead cert for the top job at his current employer, BP, were it not for the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. The subsequent PR fiasco terminated the BP career of the
‘Sanctions,’ said Kofi Annan, ‘are a necessary middle ground between war and words.’ Neither the EU nor the US will deploy troops or missiles to defend Ukraine against Russian-backed separatists, while Vladimir Putin basks in hostile Western words and turns them to domestic advantage. That leaves sanctions as the only means of seeking to influence
‘Perhaps I should shift my prediction to 23 July 2014,’ I wrote in April 2012. ‘That’s the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, and we must all start thinking positively about it.’ I was talking about the moment when the nation would at last shake off its economic gloom, which I had previously pinned
‘1914: Day by Day’, the Radio 4 series by the historian Margaret MacMillan, is a gripping reminder that significant global events often arrive not in a single eruption but in a series of lesser happenings that only afterwards form an obvious pattern. Let’s hope that’s not what we’re watching in the banking sector as anticipation
In a season obsessed with sport and personal misbehaviour — separately or in combination — the word ‘fixing’ immediately brings to mind ‘match-fixing’, as in ‘Two World Cup referees suspected’ of it, and ‘Former New Zealand cricketer banned for life’ for it, to pick at random from this week’s headlines. ‘Gold-fixing’, by contrast, is a
It was at the Mansion House dinner last year that a City gent two seats away announced himself to be the custodian of one of London’s ‘dark pools’. The phrase sounded pleasingly Tolkienian but his first explanation — an electronic exchange in which large share transactions are completed in total privacy — dispelled the charm.
When John Prescott used to wax garrulous about a ‘superhighway’ from Hull to Liverpool, everyone assumed it was a wheeze to spray southern taxpayers’ money across the region he saw as his power base. When George Osborne decided to ‘start a conversation’ this week about a super-city along the same route, an English equivalent of
‘Iraq turmoil sends crude oil prices to nine-month high’ is the sort of headline that used to send shivers down economists’ spines, especially if it appeared on the same page as ‘Europe faces gas shortage as Russia cuts Ukraine supply’. How worried should we be at the current turn of events in the energy world?
‘The internet is broken,’ a corporate chieftain told me last week. It was an arresting remark, but he did not mean that his home Wi-Fi hub had gone down and required a jab with a paperclip, as mine frequently does. He meant that the entire web has become so insecure — so plagued by industrial-scale
It’s a constant theme of this column that today’s young need to stop whingeing about their prospects and get on with making their own future. But a quick north-of-the-border tour as official campaigning kicks off for the Scottish referendum persuades me that the pessimism of the generation about to enter the world of work is
The postman at the door is stooped by his burden like an allegorical statue of Labour Oppressed by Capital. His wearisome, low-waged task is to deliver a copy of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century — or perhaps multiple copies all round the town, since this breezeblock of a thesis on the iniquities of
Readers in all sorts of places — at the club bar, over a birthday lunch, even along the church pew — had been telling me I was wrong not to subscribe to the ‘save AstraZeneca’ campaign, and too complacent about the future of British science when I wrote: ‘the game is Pfizer’s for the taking,
Do we really mean to kill investment banking, or are we trampling it by accident in a fit of righteous zeal? By ‘we’ I mean politicians, regulators and public opinion, and by ‘kill’ I mean rendering it unattractive or unviable for any shareholder-owned financial business except on the most limited scale — and as uncertain
Pfizer will almost certainly have to offer more than its second bid of £50 a share for rival drug giant AstraZeneca, but the American predator seems to be winning the game of spin so far. For a start, Pfizer chief Ian Read turns out to be a Scottish-born graduate of Imperial College London who has
