Any other business

Saturday

Jonathan Davis

Spend more time in the library

Where do most investors go wrong in making their investment decisions? Warren Buffett, whom many like to think of as the world’s most successful stock market investor, has no doubts. People need to spend more time with their nose in a book, thinking about the way the world works, and less time looking at the price of the shares that they own. Buffett has long since moved on from buying individual shares to buying whole companies, but the way he spends his time has not changed much in the 50 years he has been a professional investor. One day a couple of years ago, he received a faxed letter about a company he had never heard of. He liked what he saw. ‘The next day,’ reported the Wall Street Journal, ‘Mr Buffett offered to buy Forest River.

Margareta Pagano

Riches from oily rags

If recycling your domestic rubbish is a pain, imagine what it’s like running a car-repair workshop: batteries, bolts, bulbs, bumpers, plastics, oily rags, scrap metal and toxic liquids are just a few of the nasties. Understandably, most of Britain’s 25,000 garage owners either don’t bother — nearby rivers are handy — or they take the rubbish to landfill sites or incinerators where they pay a packet to get rid of it. Either way they are likely to be breaking the law, or to be about to break it: a new EU directive comes into force at the end of this month stipulating that all waste must be pre-treated before it even goes to the landfill.

John Andrews

It has more companies than citizens, but the prince’s tiny tax haven is thriving

John Andrews on city life in Liechtenstein. The speed limit on Swiss motorways is 120km per hour and, if you’re travelling from northern Italy to southern Germany through Switzerland at exactly that speed, you’ll spend a scant ten minutes traversing the entire western border of the sovereign Principality of Liechtenstein. Glance to your right about halfway up the country and you’ll notice a fairy-tale castle perched on a hill, overlooking a small town. This town, as well as being the geographical centre of the tiny, landlocked state (the fourth smallest in Europe), is also its political focal point: welcome to Vaduz.

Paul Johnson

They sang ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ as the Titanic went down

To me, history has always had a double magic. On the one hand it is a remorseless, objective account of what actually happened, brutally honest, from which there is no appeal to sentiment. On the other, it is a past wreathed in mists and half-glimpses, poetic, glamorous and sinister, peopled by daemonic or angelic figures, who thrill, enchant and terrify. I like both, and see them as complementary. My father taught me the first, under his maxim: ‘Never believe a historical event as fact unless you can document it.’ My mother taught me the second, when I was a child cradled in her arms, listening to her soft, musical voice discoursing of heroes and heroines, and strange, uplifting events.

Martin Vander Weyer

Another mistake by Brown

The proposals in the pre-Budget report were a desperate, knee-jerk response to the swing to the Tories in the polls. Rather than demonstrating Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling’s vision for the country, it revealed their commitment to blatant, vote-chasing expediency. Ultimately, this will make the country think less of them. Martin Vander Weyer There’s a new pair of eyebrows at the forefront of British public life. The Northern-rocked Governor of the Bank of England may have lost all traditional power of his once-splendid superciliary tufts – indeed, he might as well go the whole hog and have the damned things plucked, to discourage further comment – but the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alastair Darling, has a set to be reckoned with.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

A chastened City

Can we make a link between the chopping of 1,500 jobs, mostly in London and New York, by the Swiss banking giant UBS, and the news that the City of London Corporation has come up with a £300 million contribution to the financing of Crossrail, the long-awaited Heathrow-to-Docklands transport link? Well, connecting unrelated news events on any given day and extracting lessons from them is what columnists are supposed to be for. So let me have a go. The jobs lost at UBS Investment Bank, which include that of its chairman and chief executive Huw Jenkins, are the tip of the iceberg of City redundancies to come this autumn.

Paul Johnson

The countryside should be a place of life, not of death

This is the time of year when I am irritated by the pop-pop of shotguns near my house in Over Stowey. Not that West Somerset is a great county for shooting. It is a place for hunting. I have counted up to 13 packs of hounds in the neighbourhood. Most of them are foxhounds, and there are staghounds too, of course, but also beagles and harriers not so far away. I favour hunting as the best way of solving difficult problems — keeping down foxes which kill chickens for fun, and dispersing the red deer, which otherwise congregate in scores and can kick to pieces a big field of turnips in 24 hours. So I am glad that the legal ban on hunting has not worked. Shooting birds for sport is a different matter.

Matthew Lynn

A symbol of change – but is she the real thing?

It wasn’t hard to see what was in it for President Nicolas Sarkozy when he appointed Christine Lagarde as France’s new finance minister in June this year. After a glittering career in international law, Lagarde had become a star in American business circles: the 30th most powerful woman in the world, according to that ultimate arbiter of commercial influence, Forbes; the fifth best female executive in Europe, according to the Wall Street Journal. Sarkozy, like all modern politicians, is obsessed with symbols and narratives. In Lagarde, he had his storyline made flesh. Look, he’s saying — we’re changing. This is not the old, closed-for-a-four-hour-lunch, anti-globalisation France. This is the new, power-breakfasting, 24/7, change-embracing France.

James Harland

Penguin’s irrational exuberance

What’s the biggest threat to the stability of the global economy today? Derivatives? Hedge funds? The credit crunch? Actually it could be Pearson, the company that owns the Financial Times. How so? By allowing its Penguin imprint to pay $8.5 million for the memoirs of Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Let me explain. In March last year, Penguin won an auction for worldwide rights to Greenspan’s memoirs — titled The Age of Turbulence — beating off competition from the rest of the publishing industry. The cheque it ultimately wrote was the second-largest ever paid for a non-fiction book, only beaten by Bill Clinton’s My Life at $10 million. Now, Greenspan is an estimable figure.

Elliot Wilson

Find another planet and plant it with soybeans

Elliot Wilson says there isn’t enough arable land in the world to make plant-based fuels a viable alternative to oil ‘Biofuels?’ Ricardo Leiman gives an imperious snort, his eyebrows wobbling. ‘Bio­fuels?’ he repeats in an offended tone, as if asked to perform a lewd act. ‘There’s about 20 million tonnes of processed edible oil on the planet right now — not enough to fulfil 5 per cent of Europe’s energy needs, let alone any of the huge demand in the US, China, India or anywhere else.’ If Leiman doesn’t believe that biofuels are a viable solution to our energy needs, one wonders why anybody does. As chief operating officer of Noble Group, a Hong Kong-listed trading giant that crushes and refines close to 2.

Martin Vander Weyer

As the party games turn nasty, Sharapova shows bankers the elegant way to lose

When I bumped into Barclays chief executive John Varley at Wimbledon one mid-week afternoon in July, I thought he looked remarkably relaxed for a man locked in a potentially career-breaking takeover battle with his deadliest rival. We had just watched Venus Williams make mincemeat of Maria Sharapova, and perhaps Varley was cheered by the thought that it was possible to lose elegantly and still be loved by the crowd. Certainly I think he must have decided early in the ABN Amro game that he could do no more than play his best shots and pray for his formidable opponent, Sir Fred Goodwin of Royal Bank of Scotland, to be stricken by the market equivalent of agonising groin strain. That didn’t happen, and Goodwin should clinch the deciding set this week.

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Who’s eating my favourite lizards on Lake Como?

The great thing about taking a holiday every year in the same place — provided it is the right place of course — is that you notice the huge, reassuring continuities, and the minute changes which prove that life, though stable, is at work. This is what I find in early autumn at Lake Como, which I have now been visiting for the best part of two decades. I look at it very intently, and necessarily so, for I paint it in watercolour every day I am there: at least one picture in the morning, and another in the afternoon, sometimes four per day. I have probably done over 200 watercolour drawings of the lake and its surrounding mountains, its skies, little ports, forests, groves and meadows, each dated.

Simon Nixon

The Tories no longer understand the City

Simon Nixon says David Cameron’s Conservatives must stop sending out such mixed signals if they want to establish serious credibility with the business community Gordon Brown has done many things to discombobulate the Tories since becoming Prime Minister three months ago. But none so effective as the creation of a new ‘business advisory council’ including many of the grandest names in British business, from Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco to buy-out baron Damon Buffini of Permira. This was a real coup — which is why he launched it on his first day.

Allister Heath

Northern Rock: morally hazardous

First we heard about ‘sub-prime mortgages’; then it was ‘collateralised debt obligations’; now it’s the turn of ‘moral hazard’ to appear on the Ten O’Clock News. Jolted out of prosperous complacency by market turmoil, the public has started to care about economics: strange jargon and obscure concepts previously familiar only to investment bankers are going mainstream. The best way to understand moral hazard is to reflect on how taking out insurance changes our behaviour, encouraging us to take greater risks and less care of our possessions. A holidaymaker without travel insurance is more likely to keep an eye on his baggage than one who can claim compensation if it’s lost or stolen.

Neil Collins

The new senior partner sets out his stall

The trade could only gasp at the figures Charlie Mayfield revealed a fortnight ago. Next week, the new chairman of John Lewis Partnership hopes they’ll be gasping again as he opens 17,000 square feet of food hall at John Lewis in Oxford Street. No, not quite a Waitrose, but something that he claims will be different, the result of ‘co-operation between Waitrose and John Lewis’. If you thought that as sister companies they were on the same side, then you really don’t know how big corporations work. And JLP, as it is inevitably called by its executives, is a big corporation nowadays, with 68,000 employees — oops, sorry, partners — 26 stores, 185 supermarkets and sales of £6.4 billion a year.

Tim Heald

Traffic jams on land and water — and no desire to sit in a hole drinking Chardonnay

They are waiting to enter the port of Newcastle, a hundred or more miles away. There they will load up with coal to feed the voracious economies of India and China. The waiting ships symbolise the Australian predicament. The country is a principal source of raw materials for the emerging giants of Asia but it is struggling to deliver the goods. Cheap coal and various ores lie under the soil in abundance, but the demands are too great for the infrastructure. Sydney these days is incontestably a great city. In the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge it boasts two of the world’s most iconic structures; it has a sky-scraping downtown profile, intermittent traffic gridlock and 101 ways with coffee.

Saturday

Jules Evans

The Russian whose fortune fell from the sky

Jules Evans says billionaire industrialist Oleg Deripaska has global business ambitions — but a dispute with another Russian tycoon, Michael Cherney, may get in his way Oleg Deripaska wants it all. He already has quite a lot: assets in Russian insurance, pulp, construction, airports, media, cars, and oil, and a controlling stake in the world’s largest aluminium company, Rusal. These make him Russia’s second-richest man, worth $18 billion according to Forbes; only Roman Abramovich is richer. But Deripaska’s ambition is not yet sated. He wants a place in the top league of global businessmen alongside Bill Gates and Lakshmi Mittal. And so far his ambition appears to enjoy strong Kremlin backing.

Ross Clark

More bad news: no housing shortage

While all eyes were on the crash of Northern Rock last week, something even scarier was happening. Two of Britain’s many house price indices — there were eight competing in a crowded market last time I counted — reminded us that property prices can fall as well as rise. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors reported that a net balance of 1.8 per cent of its members say house prices fell in August. Then Rightmove, the property website, reported that asking prices in England and Wales had fallen by an average of 2.6 per cent. If you have just bought a job lot of buy-to-let apartments in Docklands on the never-never, no doubt this is worrying news. But not half so worrying as the figures I have had my eyes on.

Judi Bevan

Moral superiority in cheap plastic bottles

As the train trundled down to Littlehampton one warm summer afternoon in 1988, I was filled with excitement at the thought of meeting Anita Roddick. I had arranged to interview her for a book called The New Tycoons, which I was writing with my Sunday Times colleague John Jay, now my husband. Roddick was already a household name even though the Body Shop had only been in existence for 12 years. When its shares were floated on the Unlisted Securities Market in 1984 they nearly doubled from 95p to 160p on the first day — and she became Britain’s fourth richest woman.

Martin Vander Weyer

How the spirit of the Rock triumphed over the prudence of the Northern

Hindsight suggests that the Rock was always likely to get the Northern into trouble one day. The Northern Counties Permanent Building Society, founded in 1850 as the successor to the Newcastle Land Society, was by reputation ‘a serious establishment’ (one of its first decisions was to ban women from its board, a ruling observed by its successor until 1999) and its early growth was relatively slow. By the turn of the 20th century, it still had only 216 mortgage borrowers, and was one of no less than 29 building societies in a city of 270,000 people. During and after the second world war it expanded by absorbing smaller societies — the Crown, the Workington, the Elswick — but it remained firmly rooted in its home region and the high-minded principles of mutuality.