Do you sincerely believe in overseas aid, Prime Minister? If not, here’s my...
‘We have written to David Cameron to applaud his decision to stick to the UK’s commitment to overseas aid to the developing world, despite the tough economic times,’ begins a letter to the Financial...
View ArticleIn Cyprus as in Britain, the prudent must pay for others’ folly – but not...
The Cypriots are the authors of their own misfortune, having turned their banking system into a rackety offshore haven for Russian loot and lent most of the proceeds to Greece. But it was madness on...
View ArticleStealing from the thieves: why poor Russians as well as rich share Cyprus’s pain
In their second attempt to clean the Augean stables of Cyprus’s banking system without jeopardising the integrity of the euro, bailout negotiators seem to have heeded most of my advice from last week....
View ArticleIf the City is to trample on its enemies, the Lord Mayor must find his inner...
A short stroll from Poultry to the Mansion House offers vistas of the old and new City. The fortress of the Bank of England awaits its new Governor while the Royal Exchange earns its keep, like much of...
View ArticleThatcher changed the City for the better – but human nature led it astray
‘Margaret had no love for the banks,’ Nigel Lawson wrote in The View from No. 11. The idea that the amoral greed of the City and the banking crisis it fuelled should be blamed on Margaret Thatcher has...
View ArticleGold bugs have always been bores, but perhaps now they’ll be a bit quieter
Unless you bet your life savings on gold some time in the past three years — after its price had passed on the way up the level to which it has now fallen back — there’s no need to be distressed by...
View ArticleOne faulty spreadsheet is not enough to destroy the case for austerity
Economists should always leave themselves a margin for error. When challenged that free-market policies on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s led straight from boom to bust, Milton Friedman argued...
View ArticleA view from the poop deck: why Greece is failing to set a course for recovery
This column comes to you from the cruise ship Minerva in the Greek port of Piraeus. Why I’m aboard is a story for another day — and let me admit up front that, as financial-crisis reportage goes,...
View ArticleDelphic wisdom for bankers from the bishop in the library
You may have gathered from last week’s column that I’ve been cruising the Med in search of fresh subject matter. It’s the sort of cruise that includes a programme of lectures, and the star turn on that...
View ArticleThe Co-op Bank’s troubles are a sad blow for high street biodiversity
When the Manchester-based Co-operative Bank was announced last July as the buyer of 632 Lloyds branches, tripling the size of its own network, I hailed the news as a step forward for ‘banking...
View ArticleGoogle isn’t really evil, but our tax system is a muddle that breeds avoidance
‘You are a company that says you “do no evil”,’ Margaret Hodge told Google’s Matt Brittin a fortnight ago, ‘I think that you do do evil.’ It was a soundbite of the kind we’ve come to expect from...
View ArticleThe folly of turning stars into tsars and the scandal of business rates
On my way to chair a town meeting, I was chuckling over Phillip Warner’s cartoon last week headed ‘Mary Portas reinvigorates the High Street’. First, TV’s sharp-tongued queen of retail holds forth in...
View ArticleOsborne’s Lloyds sale will be all about votes – just as Mervyn King warned
When a politician’s speech is spun ten days in advance, you know there’s trouble behind the scenes. Next week’s Mansion House dinner will be seen by City attendees principally as a farewell to Sir...
View ArticleThe peril of telling politicians the truth: why number-cruncher Hester had to go
Quite a spell of bowling from the Chancellor last week, skittling Stephen Hester’s stumps at RBS and causing Paul Tucker of the Bank of England to walk even before the new Canadian umpire had time to...
View ArticleNot much of an ovation, but Mervyn marches off in the ranks of honour
Sir Mervyn King was his own man to the end: professorial, downbeat, against the tide. At last week’s Mansion House dinner — as in his final vote in favour of more QE, on which his Monetary Policy...
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Great creator and sharer of wealth? Maybe, but Mr Rich was also a terrible...
Marc Rich, the godfather of global commodity trading who died last week, ‘deserves credit as one of the greatest creators and sharers of wealth in business history’, wrote James Breiding in the...
View ArticleIs this amazing railway going ahead? Not if Boris and Mandychops can help it
‘Does anyone seriously doubt that this amazing scheme is actually going to go ahead?’ boomed Boris Johnson last week. ‘No is the answer!’ He was waxing rhetorical about the redevelopment of Battersea...
View ArticleFour recessions, runaway inflation, sky-high taxes: who says Baby Boomers had...
Here’s a competition for you: ‘The most irritating discussion on Radio 4 in the past month.’ Answers in not more than 140 characters — but on a proper postcard, preferably written in fountain pen. My...
View ArticleDetroit’s bankruptcy isn’t ‘creative destruction’ – it’s old-fashioned...
One of the best articles I ever commissioned as an editor was an account by James Doran of a road trip from the steps of the New York Stock Exchange to the back streets of Detroit in October 2008, at...
View ArticleWelby is right to attack Wonga but wrong to push credit unions as a better...
I’ve been in the pulpit again, this time to salute the centenary of the death of Charles Norris Gray, a formidable Victorian vicar of my Yorkshire town of Helmsley. Gray was a social activist with...
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