Martin Vander Weyer

If the new government’s ‘pensions review’ takes forward last year’s ‘Mansion House reforms’ – credited to chancellor Jeremy Hunt but largely the work of the then Lord Mayor of London, Nick Lyons, and designed to push the UK’s largest private-sector pension providers to commit funds to unlisted equities and vital infrastructure – all to the good. If it succeeds in ‘unleashing the full investment might’ of the £360 billion Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), as the new Chancellor Rachel Reeves says she intends, even better. We’d have a public investment fund to rival those of the Netherlands and Singapore, though still way behind the likes of Norway and South Korea.

Market reactions to the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania represent, according to taste, rational bets on the significantly increased likelihood of a second Trump presidency or stark confirmation of the madness that has overtaken America and threatens the civilised world. Shares in Trump Media & Technology – the parent of his social media platform Truth Social – rose by 30 per cent on Monday, adding more than $1 billion to Trump’s notional fortune despite the company’s revenues being, as one observer pointed out, ‘comparable to that of two Starbucks stores’. Also up were shares in gunmakers such as Smith & Wesson and in private prison operators – and US Treasury bond yields, reflecting fears that Trump will let government debt rip.

‘We are the masters now,’ I chirrup to my Holborn and St Pancras neighbours – misquoting Labour attorney-general Hartley Shawcross from 1946. I don’t mean I’ve decided to throw in my vote with the predicted Labour landslide: frankly, I’d rather give it to the candidate calling himself Nick the Incredible Flying Brick. What I mean is that as constituents of the incoming prime minister, we’re the heirs to Blair’s Trimdon Labour Club crowd in 1997. The world’s media will be all over us: we’ll be the first archetypes of the age of Starmer. But how will we feel in five years’ time?

Nigel Farage and I agree on one thing: a red-carpet welcome at the London Stock Exchange for Shein, the Chinese online fashion retailer, would be ‘a very bad idea’. Valued at £50 billion, Shein could become London’s biggest-ever initial public offering. Both the departing Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and the shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds have met Shein’s chairman, Donald Tang, to encourage that prospect. Both clearly recognise that the City’s global status is weakened by a dearth of LSE debutants and a fad for listing in New York instead – with yet another FTSE 100 company, the £24 billion plant-hire giant Ashtead, reported to be thinking of shifting its listing across the Atlantic. But could Shein turn the tide?

The City is having a busier year than pessimistic observers – including me – might have expected. The biggest deal on the block, the £39 billion bid by Australian giant BHP Billiton for its London-listed South African mining rival Anglo American, has fallen away. But plenty of bankers’ and advisers’ fees have already been clocked up on both sides and BHP may now pursue global domination of the copper market by stalking other London-listed miners such as Antofagasta of Chile. Meanwhile, the £3.

I suspect I’ve had a lot more fun writing about the annual Sunday Times Rich List over the years than many of its denizens have had clambering into it and staying there behind their high-tech security gates and their phalanx of tax advisers. The 2024 roll call includes some great British wealth-creation stories – led by the industrialist Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the inventor Sir James Dyson and the Far Eastern trading Swire dynasty. But if the completed jigsaw of 300 names makes any sort of picture, it is of a vast treasure hoard from elsewhere, and in some cases from nowhere, that has found a relatively safe vault in the UK. That’s not a bad thing in itself as an advert for our quality of life and rule of law.

If the 0.6 per cent first-quarter GDP uplift reported by the Office for National Statistics is sustained for the rest of this year, Rishi Sunak will be able to claim – as he waves goodbye – that he and Jeremy Hunt have succeeded against their naysayers in dragging the UK economy from pandemic depths back to the level of ‘trend growth’, around 2.5 per cent per annum, that used to be thought of as normal. That’s spookily in line (as is the path of inflation) with Ken Clarke’s achievement as Tory chancellor in 1996 ahead of the election that swept Blair and Brown to power the following May.

The US crackdown on trade finance for Russia from international banks – designed to impede imports needed for the continuing assault on Ukraine – is biting hard, reports the FT, quoting an investor who thinks ‘the logical endpoint of this is turning Russia into Iran’. Quite right too: sanctions like these are a vital non-military way to hobble Vladimir Putin’s campaign. But war and finance intersect in many different ways. Consider also the fate of 400 western-owned commercial aircraft that were leased to Russian airlines before the invasion in February 2022. Now stuck in Russia or its satellites, unmaintained to western standards and unfit to fly back into our airspace, they’re a potential multibillion loss for their owners and insurers.

How radically left-wing is Labour’s proposed ‘renationalisation’ of the railways? Though militant Mick Lynch of the RMT union ‘strongly welcomed these bold steps’, the real answer is: hardly at all. The revolutionary socialist group Counterfire agonised thus: ‘While it would be extremely obtuse to say that Labour’s policy is bad, it would be naive to say it was adequate, let alone particularly socialist.’ I’m struggling to disagree with that summary. The central idea of taking train operating franchises into public hands as they expire comes as no shock: LNER, Northern, Southeastern and the dreadful TransPennine Express have already met that fate, along with Scottish and Welsh trains, and those that remain private are largely despised by passengers.