Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
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When I worked in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur long ago, my office looked across Jalan Tun Razak, a boulevard named in honour of the country’s second prime minister and ‘father of development’. This week his son Najib Razak, its sixth prime minister (2009-2018), was convicted of charges relating to the disappearance of $4.5
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The price of gold has been rising since the earliest virus reports from China in December. Adherents regard it as a hedge against inflation, bad government, economic turmoil, weak currencies and negative real returns on financial alternatives, all of which are present threats. For pessimists, this week’s headlines — above-inflation pay rises for 900,000 UK
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This column has been banging on about the peculiar nature of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, ever since its expanded presence in the UK won what I described as ‘grateful applause from David Cameron’ back in 2012. I have deployed everything from serious intelligence sources to laborious knock-knock jokes (‘Huawei who?’ ‘Who are we kidding,
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The government’s £1.57 billion lifeline for the cultural sector was bigger than most practitioners were expecting — and drew a chorus of approval from arts panjandrums lined up to offer quotes on the end of the DCMS press release. A nifty media exercise, then, and a smart deployment of the Hank Paulson ‘big number’: when
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John Maynard Keynes looks down and smiles, recalling his own perhaps too-often quoted remark that ‘when the facts change, I change my mind’. Boris Johnson’s £5 billion ‘New Deal’ of school and hospital projects to stimulate the pandemic-torn economy is pure Keynes, as well as a conscious reference to Franklin Roosevelt. And like the totality
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Should Chancellor Rishi Sunak cut VAT as an emergency stimulus to the consumer economy? When Labour’s Alistair Darling made a 2.5 per cent £12 billion cut after the 2008 crash, I called it ‘an unconvincing and expensive gambit’, on the basis that shoppers would barely notice and that ‘far more significant will be the general
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Do stock markets foretell the future while politicians fudge and economists mumble? No: share prices collectively have a life of their own — driven by herd mentality, weight of money and the available range of investment choices — which indicates little more than the simple fact that what goes up must one day come down
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The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards 2020, sponsored by Julius Baer, closes for entries on Wednesday 1 July. Don’t miss the deadline: we’re eager to hear from entrepreneur-led businesses in every sector and region of the UK whose products are changing their markets, have potential for global success — and have made positive
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All logic suggests that the 14-day quarantine for arrivals from abroad really is, as Michael O’Leary of Ryanair put it, ‘a political stunt’. The best explanation is that it was conceived in Downing Street — with minimal consultation, unless someone rang Armando Iannucci, writer of The Thick of It — as a sop to focus-group
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Car showrooms are open again: some dealerships, with a hint of forgivable hyperbole, report a surge of pent-up demand. And after building only 197 new cars this April, compared with 71,000 in April 2019, car factories are returning to production — even if under new safety rules that will slash productivity for the duration and
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Should the government be prepared to take equity stakes in major companies that will struggle to survive the current crisis? That’s a question already on the table in relation to Jaguar Land Rover and Tata Steel, and likely to arise for British Airways, aero engine maker Rolls-Royce and others. We’re told Chancellor Rishi Sunak is
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The Royal Mail worker who rang my bell to deliver an Amazon package on Friday was wearing a glittery ball gown because she and her colleagues were fundraising for local hospitals: ‘Two thousand quid so far,’ she said cheerily as she accepted my donation and thanks. But if I had asked her what she thought
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The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards 2020, sponsored by Julius Baer, are open for entries. Innovation will be vital in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic and in the recovery phase that follows. We’re looking for entrepreneurs in every sector and region of the UK whose products are changing markets and have the
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This month’s most significant corporate deal attracted less attention than it might have done in normal times, crowded out by grim news elsewhere. It is the proposed £31 billion merger of O2 and Virgin Media to create a telecoms giant with 46 million customers. Following BT’s 2016 acquisition of the mobile operator EE, further ‘convergence’
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British Airways warns of 12,000 redundancies. Ryanair announces 3,000 job losses as ‘a minimum to survive the next 12 months’; Virgin Atlantic adds 3,000 more. The aero engine makers Rolls-Royce and GE talk of more than 20,000 job losses between them. Of all the sectors hard hit by pandemic, aviation is one whose prospects look
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Was the Chancellor wrong to guarantee only 80 per cent, rather than 100, of ‘coronavirus business interruption loans’ to keep small- to medium-sized companies afloat? Rishi Sunak’s announcement this week of fully guaranteed micro-loans for the smallest companies seeking to borrow up to £50,000 was reported as a partial climbdown in the face of pressure
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Keep your eye on GlaxoSmithKline. The UK-based multinational drug-maker represents the future, both as a mass-producer of the vaccines that we pray will finally defeat Covid-19 and as a beacon of the way shareholder capitalism will re-position itself in the post-pandemic era. GSK last week announced a collaboration with its French rival Sanofi to create
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When I wrote last week about business-to-business pain-sharing for survival, I was naturally thinking first about UK companies. I say ‘naturally’ because in every aspect of this crisis, national interest has, as it were, trumped transnational co-operation. That’s particularly the case where medical supplies are concerned — as in the US President’s attempt to stop
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Ah yes, the banks. They weren’t in the front line when the crisis began, but it wasn’t going to be long before they came in for a kicking. Sure enough, they’ve just had one for throwing bureaucratic hurdles and demands for personal guarantees in the way of the government’s business interruption loan scheme and for
From our UK edition
The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards 2020, sponsored by Julius Baer, are open for entries. Innovation in many spheres will be vital in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic and the recovery phase that follows. So we’re looking for entrepreneurs in every sector and region of the UK whose products are changing their