Matthew Lynn is a financial columnist and author of ‘Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis’ and ‘The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031’
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Matthew Lynn says London’s last 19th-century merchant bank, Close Brothers, is under threat of takeover by one of the modern breed of aggressive City traders, Andy Stewart Anyone approaching the headquarters of Close Brothers just off Broadgate in the heart of the City may be reminded of the words that open the Asterix books, about
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Marius Kloppers is a man who has clearly learnt that business is like warfare in at least one respect: if you’re planning an attack, it might as well be done quickly. On 1 October this year, the 45-year-old South African was installed as chief executive of the Australian mining conglomerate BHP Billiton. Within less than
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Matthew Lynn says shareholder activist Eric Knight is right to castigate HSBC’s strategy, and that the bank’s deeply religious chairman Stephen Green now faces a battle to hang on to his job When he isn’t running the world’s second biggest bank, Stephen Green, the chairman of HSBC, is an ordained priest and amateur theologian. In
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It wasn’t hard to see what was in it for President Nicolas Sarkozy when he appointed Christine Lagarde as France’s new finance minister in June this year. After a glittering career in international law, Lagarde had become a star in American business circles: the 30th most powerful woman in the world, according to that ultimate
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Nobody expects total honesty from politicians, particularly on the campaign trail. Still, when the new French president Nicolas Sarkozy promised a ‘rupture’ with France’s past, and even praised Margaret Thatcher for her willingness to ‘break taboos’, you might have expected the pledge to hold good at least for a few months. And yet since assuming
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The fiercer the fighting for our boys in Basra and Helmand, the more important you may think it is that Britain has a thriving arms industry to supply them. The reasons that this isn’t so can be summed up in one Arabic phrase which translates, ironically, as ‘dove of peace’: Al Yamamah. The fiercer the
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Amid the acres of coverage devoted to the 40th anniversary of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most celebrated record in pop history, one irony has been overlooked. The album was considered as ephemeral as any other when it came out, but has grown mightier and mightier; the company that made it, on the
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When Lazard presented its results at the start of May, you might have expected the investment bank’s smooth-talking chairman Bruce Wasserstein to have been in upbeat mood. After all, Wasserstein trades on his reputation as the greatest mergers and acquisitions banker of all time. Lazard likes to think of itself as the finest M&A house
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Most of the young men working on ‘hedge fund alley’, the narrow streets leading away from Berkeley Square in Mayfair, have expensive but unsinister ambitions. They’d like a new Aston Martin DB7, preferably convertible. They’d like a swanky new penthouse overlooking the Thames, plus a girlfriend who might have stepped out of the pages of
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Even allowing for retro-chic, there were some things from the 1970s that most of us assumed were never coming back: cheese-and-wine parties, lime-green bathroom suites, and trade unions setting industrial policy. The little cubes of cheese and the green baths look safely forgotten. But the brothers? They’re back. In the past few months, trade unions
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Before the number-crunchers of private equity and the hedge-fund world took control, the City was dominated by a pretty rough gang. Predatory tycoons such as Lords Hanson and White, Tiny Rowland of Lonrho and Sir Nigel Broakes of Trafalgar House were the big beasts of the stock market. They created conglomerates to match their egos,
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Of the Australian tycoon Alan Bond it used sometimes to be remarked that, after a nuclear war, there would be only three things left alive: seaweed, cockroaches and Bond. In British business these days, there is probably only one man with the same kind of durability: Peter Sutherland, chairman of BP. The recent warfare at
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If you ever happen to find yourself teaching an economics class at a private school, here’s a question you could write on the blackboard. Which industry manages to keep pushing up its prices faster than inflation, and expanding its market share at the same time? The answer is the one you’re in: private education. In
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Matthew Lynn says Porsche is supremely successful in its own niche, but that does not qualify it to run Europe’s largest mass-market car maker There are only three hard and fast rules in the motor industry, if you want to make money. Never build an orange car; steer clear of Formula 1; and never bet
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Matthew Lynn finds private military contractors such as Colonel Tim Spicer — formerly known as mercenaries — responding to demand in a high-growth business sector Sitting behind his smartly fashioned desk in one of the new, antiseptic office blocks that line London’s Victoria Street, Tim Spicer looks the very model of the modern entrepreneur. He
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If you happened to be scripting a James Bond movie and were looking for a role model for a fabulously sinister corporation, there can be little doubt where you would look for inspiration today. Gold no longer matters to the global economy, oil is running out, and old-style media magnates are too busy fretting about
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A traditional British brand. A great history. Businessmen love it. Strong in the home counties. Younger people don’t have much idea what it stands for, and probably wouldn’t want it if they did. If these were the political pages, you’d assume we were discussing the Conservative party. But this is the Business section, and we’re
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From a distance, the new Wembley Stadium looks like a stately cruise liner forced by rough seas to dock in some tatty West African port. With its gleaming surfaces and huge vaulting arch, the stadium is all glamour, yet it is moored in a desolate landscape littered with kebab shops and second-hand car dealerships, with