Martin Vander Weyer

Reading the annual economic report of the Bank for International Settlements while lying beside a pool with an Aperol spritz in hand is a challenge I accepted on your behalf. Based in Basel as a hub for the world’s central banks, BIS is always careful in its prose for fear of setting cats among global pigeons. But this year’s bulletin is a serious storm warning, based on four factors that in a worst-case combination could trigger market mayhem. First, inflation driven by Middle East conflict has left oil market imbalances that will take ‘several quarters to purge’, with the risk of further volatility; BIS doesn’t actually say ‘If Trump goes batshit crazier’, but that’s the subtext.

The passing, aged 100, of the former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, prompts thoughts about shifting tensions between politicians and central bankers. Greenspan’s 18-year Fed tenure spanned those of presidents Reagan, Bush senior, Clinton and Bush junior. All had reason to thank him for his mastery of markets, even though history now regards him as a key architect of the 2008 crisis, which came shortly after his retirement and was certainly fuelled by his era of easy money and light regulation. And though Democrats occasionally took potshots at him for being a free-market right-winger at heart, few seriously accused him of Republican partisanship and no one challenged the abiding value of his institution’s independence.

The Damascene moment in my personal Brexit journey came not when my pen hovered over the referendum ballot on 23 June 2016, but a month earlier. In Amsterdam for a British commercial property jamboree, I was about to speak on a panel with the pro-Remain pundit Steve Richards and the ultra-federalist Belgian MEP Guy Verhofstadt. ‘What you need here is a tub-thumping pro-Leave rant,’ I told the organiser. So that’s what I attempted, including some low jibes at the glowering Belgian, who for comic effect I claimed was my cousin. Then I called for an out-or-in show of hands and lost it (this was an audience reliant on European investors) by roughly 500 to five. Afterwards I thought: did I really offer a blueprint for freedom and prosperity or was that just undergraduate knockabout?

To the London Stock Exchange (LSE) for a ‘scale-up capital’ circus in which 18 ambitious tech ventures had ten minutes each to pitch to potential investors: everything from hydrogen fuel-cell cars to affordable advertising design, ‘dark pool’ forex trading and AI-driven geopolitical forecasting. The sponsor was the Worshipful Company of Entrepreneurs, which ranks 112th in City livery precedence behind all manner of defunct medieval trades but, on this evidence, punches above its weight in promoting its modern cause. A dearth of risk capital for British innovators has driven far too many in recent years into the hands of foreign buyers.

Best not to say too much about Albert Manifold, who was ousted as chairman of BP last week after only eight months in post over ‘governance oversight and conduct issues’. Manifold called the board’s allegations against him ‘lies’ and writs may be expected to fly. But the broader question is why a 117-year-old company built on long-term collegiate strategy-making has become incapable of holding a stable leadership team together from one year to the next. Bernard Looney was chief executive from 2020 until he resigned in 2023 after allegations that he misled BP’s board over relationships with colleagues. His successor, Murray Auchincloss, lasted less than two years before being replaced by Meg O’Neill, headhunted from Woodside Energy in Australia.

Is the flotation of Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture on the US Nasdaq exchange a beacon for the future of earthly capital markets and interplanetary relations, or just bonkers? The answer is it’s both, as well as being a stratospheric ego trip for Musk himself, who according to the prospectus will not only retain 85 per cent of the company’s voting rights but will also be awarded an extra billion shares if it succeeds in establishing ‘a permanent human colony on Mars’. In every sense, like Star Trek’s USS Enterprise, this spaceship is heading where no man has gone before. On the positive side, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet constellation, with ten million subscribers, is already profitable.

Already heard enough of ‘Is Manchesterism a thing and did Andy Burnham invent it?’ I’m afraid you’ll hear a great deal more between now and the Makerfield by-election – and long afterwards if Burnham wins the seat and the subsequent Labour leadership contest. So here’s a reminder that he defined Manchesterism in an interview last year as ‘consensual, business-friendly socialism that seeks to retake public control of all essential services’ – though in nine years as Greater Manchester’s mayor he achieved that latter objective only to the extent of imposing integrated fares and timetables on privately run buses. My own definition of Manchesterism, in response to his, was ‘manoeuvring shamelessly for power on the strength of other people’s achievements’.

The 50th birthday of New York private-equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts – founded with $120,000 by the cousins George Roberts and Henry Kravis and now holding $758 billion of assets under management – is a moment to ask whether the modus operandi the firm pioneered has been good or bad for the world. Private-equity buyouts of underperforming public companies have certainly been a catalyst for sharper corporate performance across every western economy. But with what impact on society? Some buyouts also provide cover for ‘sin’ businesses that harm the planet or deny workers’ rights. KKR itself will never live down the book title Barbarians at the Gate, referring to its ruthless 1988 takeover of RJR Nabisco.

In the hierarchy of factors that will make consumers curse politicians and company bosses this summer, food price inflation probably ranks higher than holiday flight chaos. But both will contribute to an ugly mood that will manifest everywhere from Question Time audiences and airport voxpops to outbreaks of mass shoplifting. And only the last blip of both irritants can truly be blamed on what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz. A thinktank report grabbed headlines on Monday with the claim that UK food prices could be 50 per cent higher by November than they were at the onset of the cost-of-living crisis in 2021. But that’s not a particularly startling figure, given that ONS statistics for the five years to November 2025 already showed a 38.

A sandwich with Andy Haldane, the former Bank of England economist, now president of British Chambers of Commerce, is the intellectual equivalent of a lunchtime workout with an ultra-fit personal trainer – or so I imagine, having never submitted to the latter experience. When his BCC role was announced in February, Haldane spoke of ‘a fighting chance’ that UK growth would beat expectations for the coming year. But that was before the closure of the Strait and the resurgence of global demons. The purpose of the sandwich was to find out if he had tempered his upbeat tone. The Iran conflict is ‘the last thing anyone needed, least of all the UK’, he began.

There’s a Tube strike in the old-fashioned style as I write – and you’ll understand the irritation, mine and that of restaurateurs across London, when I add that I’ve just cancelled a table at Noble Rot in Greek Street because my companion can’t face struggling into town. The loss of trade on these days, of which more are planned for May and June, is immeasurably damaging for an already fragile urban economy. More irritating still is the fact that behind the disruption is disharmony between unions: RMT members, just under half the driver workforce, are striking against Transport for London’s proposal of a four-day week (plus extra days off in return for other minor changes) which their Aslef brethren are keen to accept.

What with headlines focused on the Strait of Hormuz and scare stories about out-of-control AI, forecasts of a storm in the less vivid field of ‘private credit’ have dropped down the news agenda. But thunder continues to rumble since the collapse in London of the short-term property lender Market Financial Solutions, now being investigated for fraud – and there are connections between private credit, Iran and AI that could turn a storm into a hurricane. Governor Andrew Bailey of the Bank of England first talked of ‘alarm bells’ in the US private credit sector last October. The latest indicator is a stampede of investor withdrawals from Blue Owl, a prominent New York private lender.

Welcome to the new tax year, with its overflowing hamper of half-baked, growth-eating, enterprise-crushing Labour measures. And if you happen to be one of the 4.4 million self-employed who scrape an independent living despite rising costs and red tape, welcome to what must surely be one of Whitehall’s longest-running but least funny sitcoms, Making Tax Digital (MTD). If your income from self-employment (or rents as a landlord) exceeds £50,000 a year, you must henceforth submit quarterly digital updates to HMRC; next year the threshold will drop to £20,000. You’ll have less time to pursue your trade but your costs will rise, because you’ll need new software and more professional advice.

As chairman of the value-for-money Iceland frozen-foods chain, Richard Walker might be expected to know what he’s talking about in his newly ennobled role as the government’s ‘cost of living champion’. But he was also one of the few recognisable names on the list of 121 ‘business leaders’ who endorsed Labour’s clueless economic programme ahead of the 2024 general election. So we should be wary of his intervention on Rachel Reeves’s behalf, warning ‘profiteers’ not to ratchet up prices in response to the Iran crisis, having already ‘hauled petrol retailers and energy producers into Downing Street’ to tell them ‘opportunistic rip-offs will not be tolerated’.

There’s very little to celebrate in Downing Street these days but it must have been vodka shots all round in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s office last week when Revolut, the City’s glossiest fintech start-up, finally secured the banking licence it has been pursuing for the past five years. Founded as a currency payments app in 2015 by two tech entrepreneurs, Russian-born Nik Storonsky and Ukrainian Vlad Yatsenko, Revolut acquired customers at an explosive rate and first sought recognition as a UK bank – able to accept deposits under the umbrella of the Financial Services Protection Scheme – in 2021.

Shares everywhere dived for cover as missiles started flying. But one stock ahead of the pack, and responding to a different alarm, was Barclays, which has dropped 20 per cent since early February, having quadrupled over the preceding two years. I’ll declare an interest as custodian of a modest family holding – making me all the keener to understand what this rise and fall is telling us. All banks were deeply devalued after the 2008 financial crisis and remained so, long after their balance sheets were repaired in the 2010s. More recently, the market narrative was that they were behaving sensibly again and their shares were shiny bargains. Barclays – run since 2021 by C.S.

All eyes on the Strait of Hormuz, the 24-mile-wide choke point between Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, through which moves, in normal times, around a fifth of the global supply of liquified natural gas and a quarter of all seaborne oil. But with Iran threatening to set fire to any ship in the strait, LNG production halted in Qatar after missile attacks, and gas stocks in user countries low at the end of winter, prices are soaring as they did at the outbreak of the Ukraine war. You may hear it said that the UK is relatively well placed for this supply crunch because we import only a small portion of LNG from the Gulf and much more from the US and Norway; and because almost half of UK electricity now comes from renewables, with wind to the fore.