Robert Cottrell

Call me a sentimentalist, but when Rupert Murdoch gave a speech here last week telling News Corporation to go carbon-neutral, and to inspire its many millions of viewers and readers to do likewise, I couldn’t help thinking that he must have been affected by the spectacle of human frailty revealed to him in his current efforts to take over Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal. To bring the Journal into his portfolio, Mr Murdoch needs to win over the extended Bancroft family, descendants of a swash-buckling newspaperman called Clarence Barron who bought control of Dow Jones in 1902.

When Charles Prince, the chief executive of Citigroup, announced two weeks ago that he was getting rid of his bank’s rather likeable corporate logo, a red umbrella, I feared that he might be tempting the household gods. And the gods have duly stirred. The Financial Times has reported grumblings from some big shareholders that the Citigroup board has been giving Mr Prince too easy a ride while the share price has languished. The external directors are mostly other big bosses ‘naturally sympathetic to Chuck’, says one complainer. A fair argument, and a timely one.

Larry Silverstein, the 75-year-old property developer who bought a lease on the twin towers of the World Trade Center six weeks before they collapsed, has been a lonely defender these past five years of his right to build the office space of his choosing on what to others is sacred ground. But he has played a difficult hand well — not least because he is, by all accounts, a difficult man. Facing off against the Port Authority, which owns the World Trade Center site, and the state government, which half-owns the Port Authority, and the city government, which has had its own ideas for the site, he has haggled doggedly over who gets the last say on what gets built. The state and city would have loved to find a way of squeezing him out cheaply.

The markets are jumpy, the dollar is tired, and Alan Greenspan has sunk below the horizon. Now more than ever the dollar needs a top-class spokesman, and in Hank the Tank it may have found one. Henry Paulson, boss of Goldman Sachs, lion of Wall Street, took some persuading to jump ship and serve as George Bush’s new Treasury secretary, but in the end the sentimental lure of seeing his name on dollar bills proved too much. After all, he owns 700 million of them himself. He seems to think that he will get a say in making economic policy, unlike his two ineffectual predecessors at Treasury, Paul O’Neill and John Snow, whose role was limited to talking policies up.