Any other business

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 interest rates and fountains of Brussels subsidy that fuelled the grotesque real-estate boom which ended in spectacular bust. Unlike the Greeks, the Irish accepted the need for severe austerity measures without rioting or recrimination. But their tiny economy, one fifteenth the size of Britain’s, is now a pawn in a double game.

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, having flown into the blissed-out Californian version of post-election Obama-mania, which all too briefly vanquished the clouds of financial crisis. Crossing the pond again, this time to Atlanta and Philadelphia, I find the clouds have closed in and the economic mood is, by American standards, strikingly downbeat.

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 in ‘on change, amongst the merchants’, in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.

Good news for the governor: a groundswell of responses to the era of bad banking ‘Of all the many ways of organising banking,’ declared the Governor of the Bank of England this week, ‘the worst is the one we have today.’ That spurred me to continue my search for ‘relationship banking’ — and the latest batch of readers’ nominations suggest, encouragingly, that unreformed practitioners still survive even within our shamed and bailed-out mega-banks.

If I hear one more clunking metaphor about how we’re trapped in the debt mine but there’s light at the end of the tunnel, I think I’ll bury myself in the garden. If I hear one more clunking metaphor about how we’re trapped in the debt mine but there’s light at the end of the tunnel, I think I’ll bury myself in the garden. But the grit, faith and, most of all, mutual support of the Chilean 33 have given us a new role model and it would be churlish to deny their political leaders — who just happened to be there at the time — a global curtain call. President Pinera looked so pleased with himself in London this week that I half expected to see him shimmy across the Strictly dancefloor waving a winning lottery ticket.

‘A jolly nice little place for lunch, handy because you can get to it on a number 11 bus.’ That was a senior partner of Cazenove the stockbrokers talking about the Savoy in the days when captains of industry and City grandees treated its Grill as their canteen — and my predecessor Christopher Fildes, who nicknamed it the Dealmakers’ Arms, was often at the captains’ tables. ‘A jolly nice little place for lunch, handy because you can get to it on a number 11 bus.

‘HSBC shareholders should remember that slavish adherence to corporate fashion is usually what gets banks into trouble,’ I wrote in May, in response to whispers that executive chairman Stephen Green was under pressure to make way for a conventionally non-executive outsider. ‘HSBC shareholders should remember that slavish adherence to corporate fashion is usually what gets banks into trouble,’ I wrote in May, in response to whispers that executive chairman Stephen Green was under pressure to make way for a conventionally non-executive outsider.

Another time,’ began the Gospel reading last Sunday, ‘the tax gatherers and other bad characters were all crowding in to listen...’ Bible scholars will have spotted that our curate chose the New English version of the parable of the lost sheep, and that ‘tax gatherers and other bad characters’ is the modern rendering of ‘publicans and sinners’. Another time,’ began the Gospel reading last Sunday, ‘the tax gatherers and other bad characters were all crowding in to listen...’ Bible scholars will have spotted that our curate chose the New English version of the parable of the lost sheep, and that ‘tax gatherers and other bad characters’ is the modern rendering of ‘publicans and sinners’.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business If life was a Doctor Who series and I was the scriptwriter, I would have the courageous Chilean miners tele-ported instantaneously to the surface — and replaced at the bottom of the collapsed shaft by 33 gloomy economists and market commentators. They would range from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who says that the present recovery isn’t really a recovery at all, to Société Générale strategist Albert Edwards, who says investors should brace for a ‘bloodbath’ as the US slides back into recession. Instead of the antidepressants that are being sent down to keep the miners’ spirits from sinking, the economists would be fed a constant diet of cheerful news items.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business ‘If the rich really wish to create a better world, they can sign another pledge: to pay their taxes on time and in full; to give their employees better wages... and working conditions; to use production methods that don’t kill or maim or damage the environment...’ That was Peter Wilby in the Guardian, responding to the news last week that 40 American billionaires have pledged to donate half (or in Warren Buffett’s case, 99 per cent) of their fortunes to good causes. Wilby perfectly encapsulates the British left’s contempt for the notion of charitable giving funded by free-market capitalism — and the prevalence of his view is one reason why the culture of philanthropy in this country is so subdued.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business It’s nonsense to accuse high street banks of failing to lend to businesses because the money they might have lent has been siphoned off for bonuses — that just isn’t how it works — and it’s good news that they have been announcing restored or increased profits this week. It’s also absurd to claim that George Osborne and Vince Cable should or could instruct them how to lend.