In times of anxiety, I always turn to Jane Austen’s novels for tranquil distraction. Not that Jane was unfamiliar with financial crises and banking failures. On the contrary: she knew all about them from personal experience. As a young girl she seems to have regarded bankers as rather glamorous figures. In Lady Susan, written when
‘Whenever there’s a catastrophe on Wall Street, our business just gets better — because our products become more collectable.’ So says Bob Kerstein, founder of Virginia-based Scripophily.com, the world’s largest buyer and seller of historic bonds and share certificates. The recent blizzard of insurance and investment banking failures has brought Kerstein particularly brisk business. ‘Our
Number 35, St Andrew Square in the heart of Edinburgh’s New Town has no name plate or corporate signage. It is an anonymous executive office used by Sir Fred Goodwin, Royal Bank of Scotland’s now-departing chief executive, for discreet meetings away from the bank’s out-of-town campus headquarters at Gogarburn. From its elegant Georgian first- floor
Kim Schlunke would like you to buy a flying saucer. No, honestly, he’s got a video of it on his mobile, showing one buzzing round his lab in Perth, Australia. See it fly! See it hover! See it land delicately on its little legs! It looks, in other words, like a special effect of the
The ticking parcel I failed to spot and the oil-price prediction I got spot on Last week’s global stock market panic, the overture to this week’s astonishing round of state interventions, was in part provoked by fear of humongous losses in something called ‘credit default swaps’. These arcane inventions by Wall Street rocket-scientists are a
To anyone born before 1980, the idea that the state would own a large part of the economy was normal. The ‘mixed economy’ was a typically British compromise between American cut-throat capitalism and the incompetent communism beyond the Iron Curtain — or at least a compromise between the socialist leanings of the Labour Left and
My attitude to money is simple. I want to think about it as little as possible. So I have arranged my life with this end in view. I work hard and spend less than I earn. I put aside sums for tax and VAT and do the returns promptly. I pay bills by return of
All old Africa hands have a story of their narrow escape from charging elephants to tell. I have one myself, but I know from experience that such stories are usually more interesting to the teller than to the told. They are not quite as bad as big game hunting stories, however: they are the real
Ross Clark says speculators and fraudsters saw easy money in buying city-centre flats with borrowed money — but investors and lenders now face huge losses as prices crash I have developed a rather ghoulish pastime. It involves thumbing through auction results for repossessed apartments in city centres, then checking what those same properties sold for
When the credit crunch first hit, Icelanders blamed everyone but themselves: international banks for their loss of faith, hedge-funders in London for betting on the country going bankrupt. Seven months later, though, with its current troubles and the recent central bank rescue of Glitnir, Iceland’s third largest bank, the mood is one of anger amid
Ross Clark takes a look at the TaxPayers’ Alliance Seldom has tax featured in the media over the past decade without the lanky figure of Robert Chote of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, or his predecessor Andrew Dilnot, popping up to discuss it. Yet recently the IFS’s monopoly has come under increasingly serious challenge. Whether
Just as directors’ dealings often reveal more about the immediate outlook for their companies’ shares than can be gleaned from annual reports, it often makes sense to follow what fund managers do, rather than what they say. So it was a pleasant surprise over lunch the other day to find myself in step with one
Judi Bevan hears the views of Paul Myners, the left-leaning millionaire art collector who has just become Gordon Brown’s City minister There is a telling mischief about the way the new City minister dresses. A double-breasted dove-grey pinstripe suit is worn with a white shirt worthy of a detergent ad, no tie but tasteful cuff
When Rowan Williams and John Sentamu took up their crosiers against short-sellers, they chose strange company: Ken Lay, the disgraced chief executive of Enron, Dennis Kozlowski, the jailed boss of Tyco (who took out full-page ads against short-sellers, before his company sank under the burden of accounting fraud) and the former prime minister of Malaysia
Matthew Lynn says Britain’s largest building society prospered by refusing to follow fashion — while its bolder, greedier rivals have all gone bust or been taken over Over the last 25 years, Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare has been a poor guide to financial markets. As the swashbuckling investment banks rose in
People who are infuriated by the huge sums paid for stuffed animals in tanks and the adulation heaped on Francis Bacon’s squiggly horrors should grasp that there is no reason or logic in aesthetics. Andy Warhol, no mean exponent of effrontery, if not of skill, summed up the game for all time: ‘Art is what
This is getting serious — so serious that I’ve done something I may have cause to regret terribly a year or two hence. I have sold my shares in Lloyds TSB. I did so with a heavy heart, and an even heavier loss, since they were bought when the shares were yielding 7 per cent,
Why do men want to rule the world? The question is prompted by the British Museum’s exhibition of objects from Hadrian’s day. They have gone to a lot of trouble. Worth it? Hadrian was one of those supremely busy, and colossally boring, people who crop up on history’s pages to puzzle us. He had been
The US Treasury chief sees his interventionism as a case-by-case response to unprecedented events, says James Doran, but his critics see it as inconsistent, dangerous and ‘un-American’ It’s hard to keep up with Hank Paulson, the grim-faced US Treasury Secretary and would-be architect of a new financial order. Over the past eight months, since the
We live in frightening times. Markets are in freefall; economies are in turmoil; the financial system is on the brink. People want simple explanations and easy answers. They want to know who to blame for the mess and what can be done to clear it up. Just as well, then, that there is no shortage