ECONOMIST VIEWS: WHAT ARE THE PROSPECTS FOR THE UK HOUSING MARKET ? June 21, 2009 NICK BATES MERRILL LYNCHIt has picked up over the past few months – you’ve seen realised mortgage approvals picking up a bit from their troughs and there seem to be improvements in credit supply conditions, but supply is still relatively tight. It’s a mixed housing market at the moment and overall, a lot of the [...]
How the King of the UK back office plans to keep his business growing June 21, 2009 IT is fascinating to listen to David Andrews talk about his business. For most of us, back offices may seem deadly boring – but when you discover Andrew’s passion for Xchanging, the FTSE 250 back office outsourcing giant he founded 10 years ago, you suddenly realise just how true it is that finance and corporate [...]
THE LONDON REPORT June 21, 2009 THE JUNE gauntlet of retail company statements is set to continue this week, with two UK electronics giants due to issue full-year 2009 results. DSG, Kesa and Inchcape are lining up to report, following last week’s announcements from Tesco, J Sainsbury, Whitbread and Morrison. Kesa Electricals, which runs electronics store Comet among its Europe-wide retail [...]
Controlling banks’ capital no panacea June 21, 2009 VIRTUALLY every week during the bubble years, I would talk to economists who were well aware that the economy was on an unsustainable path. In 2005, 2006 and 2007 some of these were so anxious that they could barely sleep at nights. They usually hailed from the Austrian School of Economics – many of whom [...]
The post-trade space is facing a revolution following Mifid June 17, 2009 IN THE fast and exciting world of trading it is all too easy to overlook the importance of the necessary but rather administrative post-trade activities, of which clearing and settlement are the most important. But these play a vital role in the functioning of the European securities markets. And the European clearing and settlement space [...]
Putting the net into networking June 17, 2009 IN business, your network is your career’s lifeblood. Contacts are not there to sit unused in the Rolodex, but to be exploited for ideas, deals, jobs and opportunities. After all, only a fraction of executive appointments are made as a result of applications to advertised positions – most are down to knowing the right people. [...]
Putting the net into networking June 17, 2009 IN business, your network is your career’s lifeblood. Contacts are not there to sit unused in the Rolodex, but to be exploited for ideas, deals, jobs and opportunities. After all, only a fraction of executive appointments are made as a result of applications to advertised positions – most are down to knowing the right people. [...]
Bringing the glamour back to poker June 14, 2009 MOST of the headlines in the City over the past few months have tended to focus on redundancies and doom, with an added dash of gloom. It’s all too easy to assume that the Square Mile’s top earners have handed over the keys to their Ferraris and are searching hopelessly through the jobs pages. But [...]
Don’t expect miracles in housing market June 11, 2009 IT is beginning to look as if house prices won’t be falling much further. This won’t be of any use to the one in ten Brits that have already been plunged into negative equity, however; and even if the market reaches bottom this year, it will struggle in 2010. We must hope, for the sake [...]
BEST OF THE BROKERS June 11, 2009 TOMKINSGoldman Sachs upgraded Tomkins from “neutral” to “buy”, with a revised 12-month price target of 215p. The broker estimates the engineering company will generate a mid-cycle earnings margin of eight per cent and expects it to say in its July interim management statement that its consumer-end markets have stabilised, and its mid-year trading implies that [...]