Pfizer may have retreated but big pharma’s urge to merge hasn’t gone away
Readers in all sorts of places — at the club bar, over a birthday lunch, even along the church pew…
Are investment bankers being kicked to death? And should we care – or cheer?
Do we really mean to kill investment banking, or are we trampling it by accident in a fit of righteous…
Pfizer’s boss is winning the spin game while Miliband is losing all credibility
Pfizer will almost certainly have to offer more than its second bid of £50 a share for rival drug giant…
Patience is exhausted with bankers and their bonuses: this debate won’t go away
A bouquet to Alison Kennedy, ‘governance and stewardship director’ at the Edinburgh-based pensions provider Standard Life, for leading the rebellion…
Osborne is entitled to look smug but would be wise to wear a bag over his head
The popular pastime for financial commentators this season is sticking pins in George Osborne. To those on the left who…
The ungovernable Co-op could become the last customer of its own funeral service
‘Care, respect, clarity and reassurance’ are what the Co-operative funeral service says it offers the bereaved, and the parent Co-op…
The moral of Royal Mail: markets are capricious and bankers aren’t worth their fees
Vince Cable and Michael Fallon, ministers responsible for the Royal Mail sell-off, have been summoned for another select committee grilling…
Is full employment another of Osborne’s political squibs or an achievable target?
‘Full employment’ usually means the lowest achievable rate of unemployment — somewhere south of 5 per cent compared with 7.2 per…
Why I’ll be joining the silver stampede to cash in my stakeholder pension
At the beginning of the last decade, a young man who claimed to be my ‘premier banker’ paid me a…
Lines on the map are easy to rub out: HS2’s boss is right to push for progress
I’m sure HS2 chairman Sir David Higgins is right to argue that if we’re serious about building a new north-south…
Turn down those token directorships, girls, and tell them you want to be chairman
Last Saturday was International Women’s Day, but we celebrated early in Helmsley when my Yorkshire home town was featured in…
A reminder of the UK energy gap as Putin prepares to put another knot in his pipeline
To have written last month that the headline ‘Kiev in flames’ looked like a black swan on the economic horizon…
Why a trillion dollars of dividends is a milestone worth celebrating
Dividends paid by listed companies around the world passed $1 trillion for the first time last year, we learn from…
Sochi’s spotlight reveals the rottenness at the heart of the Russian body politic
Imagine if the BBC’s excitable commentators had been asked to cover the building of Sochi’s facilities, rather than the Winter…
We optimists aren’t always wrong but I’m keeping watch for black swans
A reader likens me to Dr Pangloss, the quack philosopher in Voltaire’s Candide who insisted that ‘all is for the…
A man who creates 1,000 rewarding jobs out of a £1 bet deserves to win a fortune
At a charity lunch in Manchester, I meet a cheerful ‘engagement manager’ from AO.com, formerly Appliances Online, a fast-growing internet…
The halo slips further
Tom Bower’s first biography of Sir Richard Branson, in 2000, was memorable for its hilarious account of the Virgin tycoon’s…
Ed Balls doesn’t care what you and I think: he’s just tweeting at Labour’s floaters
There were a million people who voted Labour in the 2005 general election but not in 2010, when the party…
The hapless stationmaster watches France’s future prosperity depart
I’ve always respected stationmasters, but that sentiment is not universally shared. A distinguished friend of mine across the Channel described…
If a bank looks dull, it probably isn’t: so what’s new at Standard Chartered?
The cautionary tale of the Co-operative Bank, its black hole and its naughty chairman has recently taught us that if…
Brand loyalty, or lack of it: why I’d rather run Marks & Spencer than Tesco
This first working week of January is apparently the time when we’re most likely to think about a change of…
Making the best of an imperfect world: a vision of the future from my hospital bed
I blamed the pheasant casserole, but I did it an injustice. Its only contribution to the drama behind my disappearance…
The Dordogne
Call me a trencherman or worse, but I tend to think of the Dordogne as a giant restaurant-cum-farm shop, set…
The ghosts of crises past – and the gambler’s strategy for crises to come
Top of my Christmas reading pile is Saving the City by Richard Roberts, a new account of the largely forgotten…
Over Staffordshire hills in search of the beating heart of industrial England
‘If I can’t see a factory from up here,’ I mutter to myself, throwing the car round an uphill bend…
