City pay revolt: Long live this most capitalist of revolutions May 3, 2012 OFF with their heads: the message from shareholders is becoming louder and angrier by the day. “Listen to us”, they are rightly telling company boards, “you work for us. We pay you. Stop behaving as if you own the place.” And that’s exactly the point: CEOs are merely shareholders’ paid hands. The real capitalists are [...]
Mervyn King should have hiked rates to deflate the bubble May 2, 2012 SIR Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, is not one for mea culpas. His speech last night was an extraordinary defence of his record in office – and a largely unfair attack on his detractors, ignoring their intellectual arguments and questioning their motives. He did admit that he should have done more [...]
Mervyn King should have hiked rates to deflate the bubble May 2, 2012 SIR Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, is not one for mea culpas. His speech last night was an extraordinary defence of his record in office – and a largely unfair attack on his detractors, ignoring their intellectual arguments and questioning their motives. He did admit that he should have done more [...]
Why Boris Johnson is by far the best choice for Londoners May 1, 2012 TOMORROW is decision time for Londoners. Our great city is at a crossroads: it must choose who to elect as its mayor at a time of extreme economic uncertainty and just months before the Olympics, when the eyes of the world will be on London. Having carefully examined all the candidates, this newspaper believes that [...]
It’s time for supporters of the single currency to apologise April 30, 2012 SOME of the stories coming out of the Eurozone are heart-breaking. Greece’s retail sales are down 13 per cent over the past year, a tragic and all too painful collapse for millions of families. Economists sometimes compare the UK’s recession with the great depression: while technically true in various narrow, statistical ways, such a parallel [...]
Secret collapse in corporate profits is hurting UK’s recovery April 29, 2012 IF you repeat a myth often enough, it eventually becomes the received wisdom. That is as true in the City as it is politics. Take the supposedly well-established “fact” that profits are booming despite the recession. That is certainly the story in America and in emerging markets. But while most large UK-based quoted firms are [...]
Secret collapse in corporate profits is hurting UK’s recovery April 29, 2012 IF you repeat a myth often enough, it eventually becomes the received wisdom. That is as true in the City as it is politics. Take the supposedly well-established “fact” that profits are booming despite the recession. That is certainly the story in America and in emerging markets. But while most large UK-based quoted firms are [...]
Shareholder activism is vital for a properly functioning City April 26, 2012 OWNERS of publicly listed companies need to behave as proprietors. They shouldn’t micromanage firms in which they invest – that is their executives’ jobs – but they should ratify some key decisions, including the pay of their top staff. In his 1970 polemic Exit, Voice and Loyalty, Albert O Hirschman explained that members of any [...]
A recession made in Downing Street – but not caused by cuts April 25, 2012 IS this a recession made in Downing Street? In part, yes. Obviously, Gordon Brown is the main culprit. It will take years to recover from his mismanagement of fiscal, monetary, tax and regulatory policies, as well as from the global, cheap money bubble. But George Osborne can no longer escape blame either. His desire to [...]
Yet another self-inflicted wound as Cameron’s gamble fails April 24, 2012 WHEN David Cameron set up the Leveson inquiry into the media, he thought it would be a clever way of deflecting attention from the disgrace of his former head of communications, the ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson, and his own lack of judgement in hiring him. He did this knowing full well that [...]