Any other business

Saturday

Matthew Vincent

Is McDonald’s now a safer bet than HMG?

‘What do you say to a former Treasury economist? Big Mac and fries, please!’ This updated version of the old 1980s joke (the original butts were sociology graduates, and any scouser in uniform) has yet to make it into wider circulation, but it can only be a matter of time. If faced with such a career opportunity, though, a civil servant would arguably be well advised to take it, for the sake of financial security. Because, if global bond markets are to be believed, McDonald’s is now a more reliable institution than Her Majesty’s Government — a fact that has implications for anyone with less appetite for risk than for cholesterol. This unlikely conclusion emerges from the current pricing of corporate and government debt.

Scott Payton

Value under the microscope

Inspired by Darwin’s bicentenary, Scott Payton explores the collectors’ market for historic scientific instruments As the world celebrates the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and as awareness of climate change continues to rise, interest in the natural sciences is soaring. This is rubbing off on the collectors’ market in scientific instruments, with globes, sundials and microscopes proving particularly popular. The appeal of globes is especially broad — because they are scientific instruments, decorative objects and comprehensive cartographical histories wrapped into a single package, says George Glazer, a former attorney who now runs a globe dealership on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (www.georgeglazer.com).

Neil Collins

Why own a car when you can borrow one?

I do hope you enjoyed that new Ferrari 612 you bought a year ago. After all, it’s cost you more than £1,000 a week. That’s not what it cost to run, it’s what it cost in depreciation before you filled up, taxed and insured the beast. Still, it could have been worse — had you plumped for the Maybach 62, you would have lost £128,899 before you switched on the ignition. We moan like mad about the cost of petrol, because we can see it. In fact, thanks to the collapse in the oil price, a litre costs much the same today as it did three years ago, despite rises in duty.

Laura Whitcombe

A century for Mr Selfridge and his spirit lives on

Laura Staples recalls the American-born retailer whose great Oxford Street emporium revolutionised British shopping habits — and is holding out against recession today Laura Staples recalls the American-born retailer whose great Oxford Street emporium revolutionised British shopping habits — and is holding out against recession today One hundred years ago this week, Harry Gordon Selfridge threw open the doors of his famous Oxford Street store. After an early career with what became the Marshall Field department store company in Chicago, he was keen to build an emporium of his own. In doing so, he revolutionised British shopping and helped create the modern consumer society. Selfridge wanted more than just a big shop.

Richard Northedge

Investment: Equities

Dividends — the directors’ cut At least the savers whose interest rates have been squeezed still have their money in the bank. Shareholders, by contrast, are seeing their dividends slashed after also suffering substantial share price falls — and there is no compensation scheme to cover their lost capital. That is a risk of equity investment but there was a time when cutting the dividend was the last thing a company did; now it’s top of the agenda as soon as business gets tough.

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 14 March 2009

With one of those tremendous jolts to memory, I was taken back 60 years by the death of Conchita Cintron. She was the greatest of all women bullfighters and I was incredibly lucky to see her, in 1950, for that was the last year she was in the ring. Where did this take place?

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 14 March 2009

‘Mum, have you ever been cock-blocked?’ asked my 19-year-old daughter on a recent visit home from university. ‘Mum, have you ever been cock-blocked?’ asked my 19-year-old daughter on a recent visit home from university. ‘Because it’s driving me crazy and I just don’t know how to deal with it. I thought you might have some good tips.’ I instinctively felt that this was probably one of those defining mother and daughter bonding moments that required a confident yes or no answer. ‘No, I haven’t,’ I replied. ‘Or if I have, I think I probably didn’t enjoy it that much and have forgotten all about it.’ Tilly was looking at me with a mixture of both envy and disbelief.

Saturday

Lucy Beresford

No sex please, we’re credit-crunched bankers

For testosterone-driven City high-fliers, the world has fallen apart, says psychotherapist Lucy Beresford — and one result is a dramatic rise in sexually disturbed behaviour There’s no doubting the trauma in today’s City: redundancy is rife and those who still have jobs are struggling to cope with an utterly changed financial world. No wonder a spate of banking suicides has made headlines. But stress is also showing itself in a more private way: in the bedroom. In the past six months, clinicians have seen a dramatic rise in sexually disturbed behaviour, ranging from a 20 per cent rise in sexually transmitted diseases among over-35s, to sex addiction and its flipside, sexual anorexia.

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 7 March 2009

A.J.P. Taylor liked to talk about the Great Depression of the Thirties. ‘It was all right for some, such as myself,’ he said, with satisfaction. ‘With a nice, safe job as a university don, I was sitting pretty. Prices were stable or going down. Don’t let anyone tell you deflation is a bad thing. It’s a jolly good thing for the middle classes with salaried jobs and savings. Life was good to us. Empty roads. You often had a railway carriage to yourself. You didn’t have to book a hotel room. Or a restaurant. Everyone glad to see you — service with a smile. You could buy a three-bedroom house for £600, new. If it hadn’t been for the rise of Hitler, I’d say it was the best time of my life, personally. Ha ha!

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 7 March 2009

Munchausen on its own is a psychological disorder in which a person makes him or herself appear ill in order to get attention or nurturing. Munchausen by proxy is when a person fabricates or induces illness in a person under their care. These individuals tend to be highly secretive and use multiple false identities. Now a similar disease has come to my attention: Political Correctness By Proxy (PCBP). PCBP occurs when complete strangers take umbrage and act on behalf of people they think ought to be offended. They assume hurt feelings and hijack them — taking unnecessary offence just because it’s there for the taking. I cite Golligate as a recent example of PCBP.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 28 February 2009

What are the salient evils of our time? They are two-fold. One is social engineering, the idea that human beings can be changed, improved and moved about as though they are quantities of cement or concrete. Today, virtually all regimes, whether democratic, dodgy or outright totalitarian, practise social engineering. Not least Gordon Brown’s crumbling New Labour set-up, where virtually all the innumerable quangos it has created are designed to engineer the population in a direction designated by government.

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 28 February 2009

A family-sized bag of Minstrels. A tube of sour-cream-flavoured Pringles. A drum of popcorn. Cookie-dough-flavoured Häagen-Dazs ice-cream. A litre of Diet Coke. For one brief moment I actually thought Ocado had extended their home delivery service to include Chelsea cinemas. I had to move my handbag off the floor just to make room for the supermarket sweep of junk food a couple beside me brought to consume while ostensibly watching He’s Just Not That Into You. By the time the trailer ended and the film began I found myself unable to concentrate and was furiously overidentifying with the sentiments contained in the title. Believe me, I just wasn’t that into either of them. I felt as though I’d been forced to gatecrash a bulimics’ picnic.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Any Other Business | 21 February 2009

Lloyds becomes one more catastrophe for which Brown will never apologise How Lloyds Banking Group chairman Sir Victor Blank must regret not having had a prior engagement on Monday 15 September last year, the night he bumped into Gordon Brown at a City reception and got bounced into the takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB. Dubbed ‘the bank that did dull’ by Neil Collins, Lloyds was a safe bet to survive this crisis unscathed — until Brown started mumbling through his canapé about sweeping competition issues aside, safeguarding Scottish jobs and saving the world. With its debt downgraded by Moody’s this week, Lloyds will be crippled for years by HBOS’s losses even if it manages to avoid majority taxpayer ownership and Treasury control.

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 21 February 2009

During the Arctic weather I re-read that finest of winter pastorals, ‘Snowbound’ by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92). It gripped me, as it always does, by its combination of intense realism about the present and its imaginative sympathy for the past. Whittier describes heavy snow sealing off a household in the early 19th century, about the time Wordsworth first moved to Rydal Mount. He uses the situation to bring back to life the faces and characters of all his family and friends, now dead, who once sat around the blazing log fire in the snowbound wooden house. It is a powerful work, by no means short — around 770 lines — and many would rank it the most perfect poem ever produced by an American.

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 21 February 2009

Last week I lost it. I flipped out. Actually if I’m being totally truthful I didn’t just flip: I f***ing flipped. Like Boris Johnson, I had a Vaz-attack of epic, expletive-laden telephone rage. Having recently received the Transport for London form to renew and pre-pay my annual (discounted) congestion charge, I’d managed to get my application in with two weeks to spare before the old one expired. I’d duly ferreted out and enclosed a recent household utility bill. I’d filled in my mobile, work and home contact numbers and given my credit card details. I’d posted it off and as far as I was concerned the job was done, dusted and crossed off my dreary ‘to do’ list. For once I actually felt quite smug and impressed by my own efficiency.

Saturday

Ross Clark

Insolvency

The Insolvency Service has sent me a questionnaire seeking my views on bankruptcy. At first, I was enthused by this chance to say what I think about Gordon Brown’s reforms which have led to an explosion in personal bankruptcies — a record 200 of them per day in the last quarter of 2008 — and the growth of a culture in which the feckless walk away from their debts. Unfortunately, the more I worked my way through the multiple-choice questions, the more I realised it was not going to allow me to state what I really think. In fact, it was clearly designed to help the government work out how it might get away with making bankruptcy even easier. So instead of completing the questionnaire, I am sending this letter: Dear Insolvency Service, Thank you for your questionnaire.

Paul Johnson

And Another Thing | 14 February 2009

Being a professional writer is a hard life. Producing a book, especially a long one, is a severe test of courage and endurance. For even after a successful day of writing, one must begin again the next morning, the blank sheet of paper in front of you: a daunting image to start the day, the mind empty, the brain groaning. I know. I have been at it for the best part of six long decades, and the number of books I have written is creeping up to 50. Several are over 1,000 printed pages. Think of the agony! I have no complaints, really. I have made a good living, and received more than my share of praise. But I like to mull over the special compensations which occasionally reward authors.

Sarah Standing

Standing Room | 14 February 2009

It’s not just politically incorrect toys that need to be hidden in the attic; certain words also need to be junked. It’s not just politically incorrect toys that need to be hidden in the attic; certain words also need to be junked. ‘Sorry’ has lost its mojo for me, it’s gone mainstream. It’s one of those words that began life as a covetable Chanel handbag only to end up as a worthless fake flogged on eBay. Saying sorry has become the must-have ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card and is being used with all the insouciance of a patient suffering from the Coprolalia strain of Tourette’s. Everyone’s at it, especially the bankers, and therefore sadly there’s precious little redemption left in the act. It’s been devalued.

Wednesday

Scott Payton

No retreat for medal winners

‘One of my American clients recently lamented: “If only I’d put as much money into military medals over the last year as I’d put into the stock market,”’ says Peter Dangerfield, owner of online medals dealership www.medal-medaille.com. The markets for military medals and ephemera are strong, with new buyers venturing into the militaria world in search of shelter from the global financial storm. The top end of the medals market is particularly buoyant, says Mark Quayle, head of the medals department at Spink, which has been buying and selling military medals since they first appeared after the Napoleonic wars.

Matthew Vincent

The rise and fall of Mr Two-and-Twenty

‘Mr Ten Per Cent’ has long been a term of contempt. Indeed, finagling Hollywood agents’ decimation of their clients’ earnings resulted in one of the few successful exports of a Spoonerism to California — to explain the difference between a talent agent and a rooster (the latter ‘clucks defiance’). So why has it taken a global credit crisis, the collapse of several major investment banks, and Bernard Madoff’s alleged £50 billion fraud, for anyone to question the remuneration of the agent’s Wall Street equivalent: ‘Mr Twenty Per Cent’? Or, to use the full, double- barrelled monicker more befitting his Mayfair cousin: ‘Mr Two-and-Twenty’?