Greece faces a very European problem: Are woes fault of Eurozone designers as much as Greek policymakers? June 18, 2015 Greece's economy is a shadow of its former self. It once had thriving investment banks which attracted cash from all over the world and invested it predominantly in the Balkans, helping countries there to thrive after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These operations are no longer. Its economy produces 30 per cent less [...]
A volcanic eruption could soon wipe out a huge chunk of the human population April 15, 2015 It sounds alarming, and it is – there's a reasonable chance a massive volcanic explosion will wipe out a significant portion of the global population before the end of the century, a report reckons. The European Science Foundation published finding estimating a probability of between five and 10 per cent that an eruption will reach a [...]
UK closes in on full £4.5bn repayment from IceSave December 18, 2014 The remains of failed bank Landsbanki yesterday paid another £1.36bn to the UK government, returning money that the Treasury paid out during the financial crisis. Landsbanki’s online UK arm IceSave had attracted deposits from 230,000 Britons through attractive interest rates, with firms, councils and savers putting their cash into the accounts. But when it crashed, [...]
Never down and out: Thor Bjorgolfsson is the Rocky of the business world December 14, 2014 After losing a billion dollar empire and rebuilding it again, Thor Bjorgolfsson shares some of the lessons he learnt. “All of my greatest opportunities have come in the middle of a crisis,” says Icelandic billionaire Thor Bjorgolfsson. “Only the brave and bold go into chaos. International corporations can’t take such risk – I go in [...]
Open Europe reveals 100 EU regulations that cost Britain £33bn March 16, 2015 The EU's 100 most draconian regulations are costing Britain over £33bn a year, according new analysis from the think-tank Open Europe. Adding insult to injury, the report reveals the accompanying impact assessment found the costs of a quarter of these regulations outweighed the estimated benefits, but were signed off by the British government all the [...]
How can Yvette Cooper and the Labour party reset their relationship with business? May 19, 2015 Labour leadership candidate Yvette Cooper caught the attention of the City yesterday when she said that she wanted to consign the party’s anti-business image to the scrapheap. Distancing herself from Labour’s former leader Ed Miliband, who stepped down following the party’s severe defeat in the General Election, Cooper said Miliband had made a “mistake” by [...]
S&P fears Scots banks are too like Iceland’s April 23, 2014 AN INDEPENDENT Scotland would join Iceland as the only European governments which could not afford to support their banking systems, analysts at ratings agency Standard and Poor’s warned yesterday. If giant banks like Lloyds and RBS kept their legal registration in Edinburgh, the sector’s assets would amount to more than 1,000 per cent of Scotland’s [...]
Supermarket wars: Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons feeling the pressure in one share price chart January 8, 2015 Tesco’s share price is up today, and by a lot: 9.8 per cent at the time of writing. All in all, though, it’s been a bad past 12 months for supermarkets, with Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons share prices all sliding against the FTSE, which has itself dropped over the same period. Tesco’s story has been [...]
A polar bear on the loose in London – or is it? Animatronic animal promotes new Sky Atlantic series Fortitude January 27, 2015 We know it's cold in London, but we didn't think it was Arctic. Why else would a polar bear be wandering the capital's streets? For a major publicity stunt perhaps? Sky Atlantic has gone all out to promote its new big-budget series Fortitude, sending an eight-foot long semi-animatronic polar bear around the city centre. [...]
UK has the most transparent government in the world January 20, 2015 Of all the countries in the world, the UK has the most open and transparent government when it comes to public data access. With a “transparency” score of 100, a report compiled by the World Wide Web Foundation found it came top of a list of 86 countries for the second year running. [...]