Any other business

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Reputations rise and fall, but Lord Richardson deserves a City statue

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business When I first met the former Bank of England governor Gordon Richardson, at a bankers’ jamboree in Japan, I remember thinking that he was smaller than I had imagined. So I was not surprised to read Sir Win Bischoff — long ago Richardson’s junior at Schroders and now chairman of Lloyds Banking Group — making a similar observation in David Kynaston’s great history of the City: ‘I think his personality was such that he seemed to be quite tall but he wasn’t. Very elegant; very imposing. A God.’ Lord Richardson died last week, aged 94, and Bischoff must be one of the few bankers working today who knew him at the height of his powers.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

How the brewers of Smethwick became the plaything of Barbados billionaires

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business If you don’t follow hospitality-trade news closely, you could be forgiven for thinking of Mitchells & Butlers as a Midlands-based brewery notable for its handsome Edwardian pubs. But it has not been that for decades, and if it was once an icon of progress in the beer trade, its name these days symbolises everything that’s depressing about modern corporate wheeler-dealing. Let me simplify the history. The Smethwick breweries of Henry Mitchell and William Butler merged in 1898; their company’s heyday lasted until 1961 when, during a fever of consolidation across the industry, it merged into what became Bass Charrington.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Be thankful for Cheshire salt: at least we don’t have to buy the stuff from Russia

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business The winter is arctic and the economy is a long way from spring, but commodities are hot again. Gold, the doomsters’ favourite, has a charmed life of its own, though its recent ascent has run out of oomph. Copper, the metal of choice for professionals betting on global recovery, perked up at the beginning of 2009 and has climbed steadily most of the way back to its 2008 peak. Nickel, zinc and aluminium bounced last spring in anticipation of a surge of industrial demand and continue to zigzag upwards, offering good returns for those who get their timing right.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Taking a stick to the City hasn’t worked, so why not try knighthoods as carrots?

It hardly came as a surprise that there were no knighthoods for bankers in the New Year honours list, and that even the blameless Lord Mayor of London, Ian Luder, received only a CBE, leaving him the first City alderman without a handle for 55 years — apparently as punishment for having spoken in favour of bonuses. It hardly came as a surprise that there were no knighthoods for bankers in the New Year honours list, and that even the blameless Lord Mayor of London, Ian Luder, received only a CBE, leaving him the first City alderman without a handle for 55 years — apparently as punishment for having spoken in favour of bonuses.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

A decade to forget? No, remember Viagra, the iPod and the death of good manners

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business It’s tempting to label the Noughties ‘the decade to forget’, except that we only get about eight decades each, so it doesn’t really seem wise to forget any of them. It was certainly a decade of nasty shocks — 9/11, the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 — and of nasty wars and bad politics, beginning with George W. Bush’s disputed election and ending with Gordon Brown’s disintegration before our very eyes. It was a decade of financial madness that began with the bursting of the dotcom bubble and ended with half our high-street banks under state control and our public finances in ruins. And yet it was also a decade of remarkable progress in so many aspects of our daily lives.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

A seasonal lament

This Christmas my thoughts go out to the people of Cockermouth, perhaps my favourite little town in all England, as it was Wordsworth’s. Especially I think of its small shopkeepers, for what makes the town so delightful is its many tiny businesses, selling unusual and curious goods. So well-mannered and friendly are the people who serve in these shops that making a purchase, however modest, is a pleasure in itself. Most of them have been flooded, the stock ruined. Wordsworth was born there, and ‘fair seed-time had my soul’. He recalls, in ‘The Prelude’, walking, aged five, along the banks of the Derwent, ‘behind my Father’s House... along the margin of our Terrace Walk’.

Martin Vander Weyer

Any other business | 19 December 2009

Is there a banker in the house? Well, please don’t ask me to go on apologising for you If I have one last sentiment to offer for 2009 — apart, of course, from warm compliments of the season — it is that I’m bloody fed up of apologising for bankers. I’ve been thinking this since October, when I told an audience at the Ilkley Literary Festival that I would rather let banks reform themselves than see them subjected to punitive taxes and fierce new regulation — only to be set upon by two elderly ladies telling me I was part of the smug conspiracy that was the root of the problem. So let me be plain.

Tuesday

Christopher Silvester

What made Madoff tick?

Madoff: The Man Who Stole $65 Billion Erin Arvedlund Penguin £9.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780141045467 ✆ £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me Sheryl Weinstein St Martin’s Press £14.56, 224 pages ISBN 9780312618377 Madoff with the Money Jerry Oppenheimer Wiley & Sons £16.99, 272 pages ISBN 9780470504987 ✆ £13.59 The Believers: How America Fell for Bernard Madoff’s $65 Billion Investment Scam Adam LeBor Weidenfeld & Nicolson £18.99, 312 pages ISBN 9780297859192 ✆ £15.

Judi Bevan

Digging deep, finding profits

The great mining predators are on the prowl again, says Judi Bevan. The Chinese are on a spending spree in Africa. And there’s plenty of room for canny investors to make money by following the deals closely For those worried they have missed the move in mining shares – the FT mining index has nearly doubled since the market hit bottom in March – consider this. As of late November, the index was still around 40 per cent down from its peak in June 2008 and a renewed outbreak of bid speculation – along with Xstrata’s so far unsuccessful approach to Anglo American – indicates that those who are actually running mining houses believe there is plenty more value to be unleashed.

Monday

Christopher Fildes

Gold’s eternal allure: only Gordon could resist it

Unhappy anniversary. Ten years ago the Chancellor of the day was congratulating himself audibly on a job well done, and in the vaults of the Bank of England grumpy porters were sticking labels on the ingots to indicate a change of ownership. This was Gordon Brown’s great clearance sale. He had chosen to auction more than half the nation’s gold reserves — a matter of 395 metric tonnes out of a holding of 715 tonnes — and to take payment in paper money, at the lowest price available for two decades. The gold was sold for $3.5 billion in 17 auctions between July 1999 and March 2002 at an average price of $275 an ounce. As we went to press it was worth around $1,125 an ounce. Sellers sometimes can’t be choosers, but this was no fire sale.

Revd Budge-Firth

Thought for the day | 14 December 2009

What bankers must do to earn customers’ trust Revd ‘Budge’ Firth, preaching more than half a century ago, reminded the City of its moral obligations It is required of stewards, that a man be found faithful. 1 Corinthians iv 2 In preparing this address, I thought at once of the text which I have chosen, and searched no further. For a steward is one who is entrusted with the safety, the good condition and the use of the property of somebody else. He is a highly responsible agent, an expert in his own department; he has to take decisions, often far-reaching, on his own, without the beneficiary being compelled to check, or even being able to check, what he is doing.

Merryn Somerset-Webb

My crystal ball sees disappointment ahead

Merryn Somerset Webb doubts that markets will go on rising — and advises us how not to get poorer in 2010 Back in early 2007, an interviewer challenged my stance on the housing market. She pointed out that I had been bearish on the property market for several years but that the market did not seem much interested in my opinion. It wasn’t crashing. And that, she said, suggested that it never would. This is a pretty dimwitted argument. But it is much used when an asset class is rising for reasons connected to something other than its real value — its very rising is somehow used to justify its rise.

Interconnect

City Life | 14 December 2009

Elliot Wilson in Reykjavik Mike, a commodities trader from Chicago, leans over the table in Reykjavik’s Prikid bar and almost whispers: ‘What’s the deal here? Where are the breadlines?’ Our group looks befuddled. An Icelandic playwright mock-whispers back: ‘What breadlines? Did you expect Reykjavik to be full of bakeries?’ No, retorts Mike, but didn’t Iceland declare bankruptcy a year ago? So why isn’t everyone sleeping on the streets? It’s not an unreasonable question. Iceland’s 300,000 citizens have just struggled through their worst annus horribilis since Ingólfur Arnarson built his homestead in Reykjavik in ad 874.

Saturday

Neil Barnett

A faraway place we should care more about — as Gulf investors clearly do

You may have seen the recent Georgian marketing campaign on BBC World and CNN, which looks like a splicing of The Apprentice and the title sequence from The Professionals. Among the familiar names dropped in the ad, such as HSBC, is an enigmatic one, Rakia. And this, it turns out, is not Bosnian firewater, but the acronym of the Ras Al Khaimah Investment Authority, which is presumably a sovereign wealth fund from that microscopic Arab emirate — though its website presents it as an inward investment promotion body, something quite different. Nevertheless, Rakia has become a major player in Georgia, buying strategic assets like the powerful media group Imedi and the free zone of the port of Poti.

Richard Northedge

House prices

Here’s my hot prediction for 2009: house price inflation at 10 per cent. Yes, that is a 10 per cent increase, and yes, I do mean 2009. Halifax figures for the year to November were still showing prices down by 1.6 per cent — but believe me, by the end of this month housing will be showing double-digit growth. To be honest, this is not really a prediction: the 10 per cent increase in property prices across the country is already in the bag. While the statisticians at Halifax and Nationwide have been reporting annual falls in the market, their raw data shows a full-blown boom. The last year when prices rose by 10 per cent or more was 2004 and they collapsed by nearly 19 per cent in 2008, according to Halifax.

Wednesday

Karl Ludvigsen

Not so sclerotic: the truth about General Motors

Karl Ludvigsen is irritated by ill-informed criticism of the troubled American auto giant — which was once a model of quick, responsive and decentralised decision-making Outraged is too mild a word for the way I felt after reading a piece in the 12 November edition of the New York Times about General Motors. Focusing on the faults of this once-great company, its author said the following: For all its financial troubles and shortcomings as an automaker, no aspect of GM has confounded its critics as much as its hidebound, command-and-control corporate culture. When GM collapsed last year and turned to the US government for an emergency bailout, itcentury-old way of conducting business was laid bare, with all its faults in plain sight.

Wednesday

Janice Warman

Africa sets an enterprising example

The hills of Michimikuru are a little piece of heaven: pickers in brightly coloured scarves move slowly through the chest-high bushes of the vivid green tea-fields beneath the slopes of Mount Kenya. But as the saying goes, local colour is other people’s poverty. Just ten kilometres to either side, the desert is encroaching; the mountain’s snowcap is melting; and soaring temperatures, droughts and storms mean the crops of the country’s primary export often fail. It’s the scene of a remarkable initiative, co-funded by the British fair-trade company Cafédirect and the German Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development, to help the 9,000 small growers of the Michimikuru Tea Company to adapt to climate change.

Elisabeth Jeffries

Can we pump carbon back beneath the North Sea?

Few people have ever seen them, except perhaps from a plane. Yet these huge, remote structures have stood planted in the North Sea, buffeted for decades by wind and wave, pumping cash into the UK economy. They are the hundreds of oil and gas platforms which churn out the equivalent of 2.8 million barrels of oil per day. But there is a strong likelihood that the North Sea will within a generation return to the unbroken grey expanse of the mid-1960s, when the first offshore rig struck gas. If the government’s predictions are accurate, most of the rigs will have tumbled by 2035. Approximately 470 installations are to be decommissioned, including up to 14,000km of pipelines, 15 onshore terminals and around 5,000 wells.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

The billion-pound hole where Chelsea Barracks used to be

Ross Clark says it’s not so much the Prince of Wales who has put the mockers on this controversial Qatari-backed development, but the grim economics of the credit crunch Gordon Brown is well known for his bad timing in selling off half the nation’s gold reserves at the bottom of the market in 1999. But with the sale of the Chelsea Barracks site in 2007 the government could not have timed it better, picking up nearly £1 billion at the peak of the property boom, just before the credit crunch and before the intervention of the Prince of Wales sent the scheme into a tailspin of litigation and anti-royal fury.

Richard Northedge

A lost decade in the London stock market

Richard Northedge says the FTSE’s dismal performance since the millennium will deter a generation of investors The familiar fallback for fund managers when shares falter is that investment is for the long term. But how long is long? December marks the tenth anniversary of a stockmarket peak that has never been seen again. Money invested in the 1990s will be showing a loss more than a decade later. How long must investors wait for equities to come right in the long term? In fact, the FTSE 100, the index of leading UK shares, is lower this week than in 1997, shortly after New Labour came to office.