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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…
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 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…
The naughty Methodist is a comic sideshow: it was professionals who ruined the Co-op
The naughty Reverend Flowers will be a comic footnote in the history of the financial crisis — but no more…
The real luck of the Irish is that they recognised the folly of the boom
My man in Dublin calls with joy in his voice to tell me ‘the Troika’ — the combined powers of…
The moral of the Co-op Bank’s ruin: good ethics can lead to bad lending
‘Satan seizes control of saintly bank’ would be a fair summary of much of the coverage of the deal that…
Arise, Sir Jim: Grangemouth’s offshore billionaire is an industrial hero
You know my theory that Unite leader ‘Red Len’ McCluskey is a Conservative secret agent? Well, having watched events at…
A new nuclear plant is better than a stab in the dark
Prediction, as Mervyn King once observed, is ‘a stab in the dark’. Who can say with confidence where the wholesale…
America makes a fool of itself with another episode of debt-ceiling drama
Some say it’s natural optimism that makes the Americans so different from the British, and some say it’s a lack…
Dickensian misery at the pawnbrokers’ — but now it’s on the other side of the counter
While attention has focused on the sudden ubiquity and alleged iniquity of payday lenders, boom and impending bust has infected…
Freezing gas bills, freezing fuel duty – and one day we’ll all be freezing in the dark
‘We need successful energy companies in Britain, we need them to invest for the future,’ said Ed Miliband in his…
