Martin Vander Weyer

Murdoch, Balls, Huhne and Satan: is it possible they’re all related? The debate about whether Rupert Murdoch and Satan are one and the same person has distracted attention from the worrying state of the economy. But gruesome statistics and forecasts are stacking up like the blizzard-stricken aircraft in Die Hard II, and waiting on the tarmac to greet them with a mad glint in his eye is shadow chancellor Ed Balls, the only man in Britain whose career prospects would catapult upwards out of a double-dip — and for my money, the only one who makes both Rupert and Satan look cuddly as puppies. What numbers are circling up there, or lurking down here unnoticed, while the hacking scandal fills every cranny of news space?

Pound shops and possession orders: parables from the post-recession high street One of our fanciest local shops — until it closed, it sold upmarket furnishings and children’s clothes — has its windows plastered with ‘Possession Order’ notices. Rumour says the space has been re-let to Oxfam, against which neighbouring retailers are getting up a petition because they regard charity shops as unfair competition in such a tough market. That Yorkshire parable is the story of the national high street this summer, after a particularly dismal set of retail sales figures for May. Habitat and the fashion chain Jane Norman went into administration last week. Thorntons are closing 180 chocolate shops. Mothercare is one of several other famous names with closures looming.

Why release emergency oil stocks? Because Opec never does the right thing Observers of oil politics have been wondering why the Paris-based International Energy Agency, which represents 28 member states including Britain, has suddenly decided to start releasing oil from its emergency reserves. What do they know that we don’t? This is a rare move for the IEA — the last time was after Hurricane Katrina. The amount of the release, 60 million barrels, is enough to fuel the world for about 19 hours, which sounds insignificant, but is also equivalent to 42 days of pre-war production from Libya, which is more relevant.

Tony Hayward’s making the headlines, but Rothschild’s the one they’re betting on Remember Lasse Viren, the Finnish policeman who fell over halfway through the 1972 Olympic 10,000 metres final in Munich only to rise again, sprint past the leaders, and win gold in world record time? Well, he’s got nothing on Tony Hayward, the former chief executive of BP who stumbled so woefully in his handling of last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil-spill disaster that he seemed to have been howled right out of the stadium of big-corporate life. Less than a year after that global public humiliation, Hayward is back on his feet and fronting a new venture called Vallares which has just raised £1.

Can capitalism care for the old and vulnerable? The collapse of the Southern Cross care homes group is a big story not just because 31,000 elderly residents are waiting to discover whether they still have anyone to look after them when it’s all over, but because it illuminates a pattern of financial engineering that prevailed in the boom years and could now unravel with very disruptive consequences. Southern Cross was bought in 2004 by the US private equity firm Blackstone, which tripled the number of homes, floated the company on the stock market and sold the last of its own shareholding in 2007, having made a 300 per cent return while four senior Southern Cross executives pocketed £35 million between them.

The construction industry looks perky, and this time it’s not building state-funded follies Not exactly Flaming June so far, is it? Up north, we’ve had one day of blazing sunshine — and being northerners, we complained it was too hot. Down south, you’ve had a continuous drizzle of dismal economic indicators. Inflation is up; growth forecasts have been slashed, in the IMF’s case by a whole percentage point to 1.5 per cent for 2011. Manufacturing output has fallen back for the first time in two years. New car registrations were down 1.7 per cent year on year in May and retail sales were 0.3 per cent worse than in April — when mortgage approvals were at their lowest level since 1993.

There’s always another disaster waiting to happen – so keep your eye on ETFs If we learned anything from the recent financial crisis, it is that when a thing looks too good to be true, it is. If a sector is attracting frenzied investor attention and pundits say spectacular growth must continue, it is surely heading for trouble — not next week, perhaps, but soon enough to allow a minority of sceptics to say ‘I told you so’. In markets, good ideas pursued to extremes mutate into disasters and, at any given moment, someone somewhere is concocting the next one. And so I draw your attention to Exchange Traded Funds, or ETFs.

Another rail report chugs past like an empty freight train bound for the sidings Sir Roy McNulty’s report on the state of Britain’s railways chugged by last week like one of those unmarked freight trains that sometimes pass through stations. ‘Stand well back from the platform,’ says the announcer, making us wonder whether the wagons are full of explosives. But such is the inefficiency of our rail system that they’re more likely to be being shunted empty from one siding to another — which is what will happen to McNulty’s ‘Rail Value For Money Study’ if unions and other vested interests have their way.

Another tale of the Great Seducer and my tip for the woman to succeed him When I was young I knew a man whose opening gambit with any pretty girl was, ‘Hello, shall we go straight to bed?’ He reckoned one in 20 said yes, so if he asked the question 20 times a day, he would never be lonely. All accounts of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF chief and would-be French presidential candidate who has been charged with sexually assaulting a New York hotel chambermaid, suggest a similar approach. In the late 1990s — during the tenure of ‘DSK’ as France’s minister of finance and not long after his third marriage — an attractive female journalist of my acquaintance was sent to interview him at the French embassy in London.

The latest mis-selling scandal is one more symptom of a deeper problem The payment protection insurance (PPI) scandal is, by common consensus, the worst case of financial mis-selling until the next one. These policies were foisted by banks on personal borrowers, supposedly to cover repayments if they fell ill or lost their jobs or encountered some other misfortune. But in many cases borrowers were not aware they were being charged for the cover, or were told falsely that they were obliged to buy it. If they were self-employed or too old, they would never have been able to claim on it anyway.

Warren Buffett isn’t always right – but he’s a $47 billion advertisement for optimism The legendary investor Warren Buffett has taken more flak than seems necessary for his lapse of judgment over his former lieutenant David Sokol, who bought shares in a company called Lubrizol before recommending it to Buffett as an acquisition for the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate. Having been tipped as a potential successor if 80-year-old Buffett ever retires from running Berkshire, Sokol resigned abruptly in March. Buffett’s comment at the time, ‘Neither Dave nor I feel his Lubrizol purchases were in any way unlawful’, was widely regarded as inadequate.

Glencore’s partners are not offering equityto you and me out of a sense of charity We’re all going to be investors in Glencore, whether we like it or not. If the flotation of this giant commodity and mining group goes ahead next month at the valuation currently indicated, it will leap straight into the upper reaches of the FTSE 100 — something that has not happened to any new share since the big privatisations of the 1980s. That means every major pension fund, and all those tracker funds and funds of funds that wealth managers love to stuff their clients into, will end up owning little bits of Glencore.

Vickers’s half-time score: not half as badas bankers feared or bashers hoped ‘Not half as bad as it might have been,’ was the reaction of the first banker I spoke to on Monday about the interim report of Sir John Vickers’s Independent Commission on Banking. ‘And forcing Lloyds to sell off a few more branches won’t do a damned thing to promote competition.’ ‘Not half as bad’ for bankers seems to imply not half as good as it might have been for customers. The increased and ring-fenced capital requirements for retail banking mean borrowers could be charged more for loans, and are unlikely to be offered greater choice.

Sunny spells, icy showers and an inflationary wind blowing from America Daffodils everywhere and the FTSE is back around 6,000. Builders are busy after the frozen winter, it’s ‘business as usual’ again in financial services, and although manufacturing lost momentum in March — exports remained strong, but nervous consumers depressed domestic demand — industry is generally perky. The British Chambers of Commerce expect first-quarter growth of 0.6 per cent or better, reversing the previous 0.5 per fall — and although recovery could be sluggish for the rest of the year, the trend will be in the right direction. So there’s room for optimism, of a cautious kind.

Farewell to a charismatic old bruiser who never threw in the towel George Walker, the former boxer, gangster’s minder and ‘leisure tycoon’ who died last week, was a persuader — both in the sense that he could be, as he once told me, ‘a bit rough with people’, and in the sense that if he decided to charm you, he was hard to resist. Fortunately, I fell into the second category. I got to know him during the period between his ousting as chief executive of Brent Walker, the conglomerate of pubs, betting shops, yacht marinas and other forms of amusement he built in the Eighties boom on a mountain of debt, and his trial on fraud charges in 1994.

Next, Osborne should tackle the plague of charity shops depressing our high streets The dramatic form of the modern, Brownian Budget speech requires a headline-grabber at the end to deflect commentators from analysis of the statistical soup and re-announced tax-tinkering that went before. But the politics of being ‘all in it together’ means that the rabbit in George Osborne’s hat was never going to be abolition of the 50 per cent top rate of income tax — and he made that pretty clear long before he got up to speak. So if you were planning to spend this weekend restocking your cellar with first-growth clarets (following Christopher Silvester’s excellent advice last week) on the strength of a sudden shrinking of your tax bill, you were misguided.

Stoical and fatalistic, the Japanesenational character will rise to the challenge When I was a banker in Tokyo in the mid 1980s, it was my occasional pleasant task to tour the provinces visiting local banks which kept sterling accounts in London. I had nothing to sell, but my colleagues and I carried bags full of golf balls to hand over as gifts at each stop, where after a ritually polite meeting with the bank’s president, we would be treated to an evening of karaoke and misowari (weak, icy whisky and water) by whichever of his underlings spoke the most English. I have fond memories of Fukuoka in the south, Kanazawa during cherry- blossom season and frozen Aomori in the north, where the karaoke songbooks were printed in Russian.

Has Mervyn lost touch with reality? No, but the City has lost its moral compass Mervyn King’s interview with Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph, in which the governor of the Bank of England accused the financial sector of exploiting gullible customers, gambling with other people’s money, lacking a moral compass, paying themselves excessively and relying on taxpayer bailouts when it all goes wrong, elicited some strong reactions. One unnamed City figure said it was ‘not correct’ for the governor to make it quite so clear that ‘he doesn’t like bankers’; another called him ‘an embittered old man with no appreciation of reality’.

Freezing tyrants’ assets is easy, but how much will we send back to Tripoli? ‘Queen freezes Gaddafi family assets’ says a headline. That’ll teach the unhinged Libyan dictator to compare himself to our blessed monarch, as he did in one of his recent rants. But for all the spin about an emergency Privy Council meeting at Windsor Castle on Sunday (I’m imagining the Duke of Edinburgh popping in to say, ‘Do hurry up, dear, Top Gear’s started’), I’ll be interested to see just how much loot is eventually liberated from London accounts and returned to whoever forms a legitimate new government in Tripoli. Precedents are not encouraging. Our bankers remain more reluctant even than the Swiss to open suspect safe-deposit boxes.