Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business I can’t claim to have invented the off-balance-sheet sleight-of-hand used by the Greek government, under the guidance of Goldman Sachs, to beggar itself so spectacularly. But I was certainly a pioneer in the field. Long ago, at Barclays, I devised a scheme to help a famous brewery (now, needless to say, a ‘hotel and leisure group’ operating under a different name) to deceive investors and analysts into believing its debts were smaller than they really were.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business ‘I don’t want to be treated like a criminal,’ a senior Barclays trader told me recently, in a slightly menacing European accent. That gives you a clue that he was not Bob Diamond, the bank’s American president, or John Varley, its very English chief executive, who have both foregone cash bonuses for 2009 despite record profits of £11.6 billion. No, my acquaintance will certainly have shared in the Barclays Capital bonus-pot, so he should be feeling more like a Euro-lottery winner than a prisoner in the stocks.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business The winter is arctic and the economy is a long way from spring, but commodities are hot again. Gold, the doomsters’ favourite, has a charmed life of its own, though its recent ascent has run out of oomph. Copper, the metal of choice for professionals betting on global recovery, perked up at the beginning of 2009 and has climbed steadily most of the way back to its 2008 peak. Nickel, zinc and aluminium bounced last spring in anticipation of a surge of industrial demand and continue to zigzag upwards, offering good returns for those who get their timing right.

It hardly came as a surprise that there were no knighthoods for bankers in the New Year honours list, and that even the blameless Lord Mayor of London, Ian Luder, received only a CBE, leaving him the first City alderman without a handle for 55 years — apparently as punishment for having spoken in favour of bonuses. It hardly came as a surprise that there were no knighthoods for bankers in the New Year honours list, and that even the blameless Lord Mayor of London, Ian Luder, received only a CBE, leaving him the first City alderman without a handle for 55 years — apparently as punishment for having spoken in favour of bonuses.

Is there a banker in the house? Well, please don’t ask me to go on apologising for you If I have one last sentiment to offer for 2009 — apart, of course, from warm compliments of the season — it is that I’m bloody fed up of apologising for bankers. I’ve been thinking this since October, when I told an audience at the Ilkley Literary Festival that I would rather let banks reform themselves than see them subjected to punitive taxes and fierce new regulation — only to be set upon by two elderly ladies telling me I was part of the smug conspiracy that was the root of the problem. So let me be plain.

Bankers are often accused of having such short memories that they are condemned to repeat the errors of their immediate predecessors, only more so. They would certainly need elephantine memories to remember a time when new banks, each with a distinctive mission and marketplace, were coming to life and flourishing everywhere. Indeed it was, in a corporate sense, Britain’s oldest banker — Alexander Hoare, 11th-generation head of C. Hoare & Co of Fleet Street, though himself still only in his forties — who pointed this out to me long before the credit crunch started knocking over high-street lenders like wonky dominoes.

Go East, young man: if I was 25 again, this is where I’d try my luck Hong Kong Not four hours since the plane touched down at Chek Lap Kok and I’m howling ‘My Way’ into a Wanchai karaoke machine to the discomfort of my Chinese friends, who all sing like Charles Aznavour. I’ll give some of the credit — for my energy level, not my singing — to Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class ‘flatbed’, which is so comfortable that Sir Richard Branson is busy claiming patent rights so he can sue competitors who copy the design. But I’ll give most of the credit to Hong Kong itself: brash, noisy, diesel-fumed, neon-lit, money-crazy, and always energising.

I was Shriti’s speechwriter once upon a time — but she won’t need me in Seoul Several national newspapers lazily copied each other last week in describing me as ‘a former speechwriter to Shriti Vadera’ — the business minister who is leaving the government to become Gordon Brown’s emissary to the G20, and perhaps to prepare the way for his post-election role as director-general of a new economic world order of his own devising. As it happens, I am indeed her former speechwriter, but only in the rather limited sense that the late Bob Monkhouse is my former speechwriter: that is, I occasionally use one of Bob’s jokes, and my old friend Shriti once used one of mine.

Bourneville chocolate with Kraft cheese slices? Not a recipe I’d recommend The £10 billion bid for Cadbury by Kraft Foods, Inc of the US has provoked little protest — other than from the chocolate maker itself, which says it would rather remain a ‘pure-play confectionery business’ than become a component of Kraft’s ‘low-growth conglomerate’. The fight will come down to price, sentimental factors such as history and culture swiftly forgotten. Cadbury, in its model village of Bourneville on the edge of Birmingham, used to be an icon of progressive Quakerism in business.

Deep in the Dordogne, I can’t find a damned thing to be miserable about Sometimes in this job you feel you’re right in the thick of it, setting agendas, kicking butt, lobbing firecrackers into the national debate. Other times you might as well be some no-mates blogger in the middle of the night. Here I was at the start of August, listing positive economic signals that justified a mood of mild optimism as we set off for our holidays, and declaring that worries about an extended recession should be left for September. And what happens? Did postal disruptions prevent that issue reaching Threadneedle Street?

Sir Fred’s return is one more sign that the storms are over — at least for now Of course it’s too early to declare an end to the economic crisis — who knows what storms the Gods have in store for us in the autumn, not to mention swine flu — but I think we can be forgiven for feeling relatively upbeat as we head into the holiday season. The FTSE 100 index has just enjoyed one of its longest unbroken rallies of modern times. The price of copper, a useful predictor of manufacturing activity several months ahead, has been rising since February. The price of oil is more volatile than we’d prefer it to be, but as George Trefgarne explained here recently, there’s plenty more in the ground. The 0.