Martin Vander Weyer

Dividends paid by listed companies around the world passed $1 trillion for the first time last year, we learn from a report by Henderson Global Investors. The total is 43 per cent higher than it was in 2009, and a breakdown shows that US companies account for about a third of all dividends paid, while European companies have been relatively poor providers of investment income. The UK, representing about a tenth of the global total, offered 39 per cent dividend growth over the period. So what, you might ask: why is a bigger bundle of global dividends a good thing? In Britain, the whole notion of dividend income for those wealthy enough to hold shares has had a bum rap during the downturn.

Imagine if the BBC’s excitable commentators had been asked to cover the building of Sochi’s facilities, rather than the Winter Olympics themselves. ‘Yeesss!!’ Ed Leigh might have yelled, ‘That’s the 21st construction contract for the big lad from St Petersburg, Arkady Rotenberg. Seven point four billion dollars’ worth, a new Olympic record — more than the entire cost of the 2010 Vancouver Games! How cool is that for the 62-year-old who was Vladimir Putin’s boyhood judo partner? Up next, the $9.

A reader likens me to Dr Pangloss, the quack philosopher in Voltaire’s Candide who insisted that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ even after he was reduced to a syphilitic beggar. It’s true that I tend to regard positive indicators — a 22-year high in the BDO index of business expectations, a CBI statement that ‘we’re starting to see the right kind of growth’ — as a pattern of recovery, rather than a mirage in a minefield. But rest assured I’m also on constant alert for ‘black swans’, those change-making events that (so we learned from a more modern thinker, Nassim Nicholas Taleb) come out of the blue and have to be rationalised afterwards.

I’ve always respected stationmasters, but that sentiment is not universally shared. A distinguished friend of mine across the Channel described François Hollande the other day as ‘un chef de gare, sans aucune dignité’ — and it’s not difficult to picture the little president, peaked cap awry, trousers unbuttoned, haplessly waving his whistle as the last train à grande vitesse departs for the Eurotunnel laden with talented compatriots who see no future in France. As modern socialist leaders go, Hollande is beginning to make Gordon Brown look statesmanlike. Nicknamed ‘Flanby’ after a cheap custard pudding, he has left decision-making to his ragbag of ministers and done nothing to steer France towards economic recovery.

The cautionary tale of the Co-operative Bank, its black hole and its naughty chairman has recently taught us that if a financial institution has the reputation of being dull, earnest and set in its ways, it probably isn’t. The collapse last year of Switzerland’s oldest private bank, Wegelin & Co — whose boss once claimed that being small and provincial made it ‘easy to avoid the deadly emotions of greed and fear’ — was another example. Attention now turns to Standard Chartered, an overseas commercial bank that has long had the reputation of sticking cautiously to the mode of business in which it has historic roots, notably in Asia, and has seen off repeated takeover approaches from others jealous of its franchise.

Jim O’Neill, the Mancunian former chief economist of Goldman Sachs in London, commands attention whenever he speaks and has a claim to fame as the coiner in 2001 of the acronym ‘Bric’ for the four rapidly developing countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China — to which economic power looked set to shift during the early part of the new century. Undeterred by the hindsight view that he should have gone for ‘Bic’, like the throwaway razor, because Russia has lagged so dismally behind the others on almost every measure of progress, O’Neill has now come up with ‘Mint’, for Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey, as the next cohort of economic giants.

This first working week of January is apparently the time when we’re most likely to think about a change of career; and last Friday was the 30th anniversary of the launch of the FTSE100 index of leading companies listed on the London Stock Exchange. The combination of those two diary items made me wonder what choice I would make if the job genie swooshed out of the pantomime lamp and told me I could re-invent myself as chief executive of a FTSE100 company.

I blamed the pheasant casserole, but I did it an injustice. Its only contribution to the drama behind my disappearance in mid-December was a residue of lead shot in the small intestine that briefly confused the radiologist. The real villain revealed by the scan was my appendix, which had taken on the raging, bull-necked, bug-eyed appearance of Ed Balls faced with a set of improving growth figures. And so it was that I spent a week in the Friarage at Northallerton, a small ‘district general hospital’ that has survived every NHS restructuring to date and is cherished by the citizenry of rural North Yorkshire.

I blamed the pheasant casserole, but I did it an injustice. Its only contribution to the drama behind my disappearance in mid-December was a residue of lead shot in the small intestine that briefly confused the radiologist. The real villain revealed by the scan was my appendix, which had taken on the raging, bull-necked, bug-eyed appearance of Ed Balls faced with a set of improving growth figures. And so it was that I spent a week in the Friarage at Northallerton, a small ‘district general hospital’ that has survived every NHS restructuring to date and is cherished by the citizenry of rural North Yorkshire.

Top of my Christmas reading pile is Saving the City by Richard Roberts, a new account of the largely forgotten crisis which afflicted global markets at the outbreak of the first world war, forcing the London Stock Exchange to close on Friday 31 July 1914 and stay dark for six months. It’s a reminder of how often in modern times the City has had to be ‘saved’ — including May 1866 when Overend & Gurney collapsed, November 1890 when ‘Nemesis overtook Croesus’ in the first Baring crisis, and of course the bailouts of October 2008. It’s also a reminder of another book on my shelf, subtitled The Night the City Was Saved.

‘If I can’t see a factory from up here,’ I mutter to myself, throwing the car round an uphill bend of the B5032 south of Ashbourne, ‘I must be in the wrong county.’ But no, I’m not lost; there below me is a long pale slab of a building that announces itself as JCB World Headquarters — adding, on a giant polythene wrap, ‘Celebrating 1,000,000 Machines May 2013’. Equidistant between the Rolls-Royce aero-engine works at Derby and the potteries of Stoke-on-Trent, what I’m looking at is the beating heart of what’s left of industrial England. I’m here for lunch with the man whose fiefdom it is, the recently ennobled Lord Bamford.