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Jeremy Warner: The City loses its competitiveness

Thursday, 23 October 2008

Outlook Over the past few years, I have written repeatedly about my fears for the future of the City. These concerns have been further enhanced by the banking crisis, during which the City's halo as a place for international finance has not so much slipped as fallen to the ground and been trodden into the mud. The Government has won political plaudits around the world for the eventual boldness of its plans for dealing with the meltdown in credit markets, but the same is not true of the financial markets themselves, where there is growing alarm that a previously non-intrusive approach to banking and finance is being replaced with an exceptionally heavy handed one. Even before the banking crisis hit home, London's position as the world's pre-eminent financial centre was already beginning to slip. At the edges, there was a growing loss of competitiveness which was starting to drive financiers and international capital into upstart centres in Asia and the Middle East.

Jeremy Warner: The rich are indeed different from us

Thursday, 23 October 2008

Outlook: Politicians living the billionaire lifestlye help illustrate the difference

Jeremy Warner: Britain may regret oppressive approach to bank capital

Wednesday, 22 October 2008

Outlook: Where Britain leads, the rest of the world follows. That, in any case, is the myth being propagated by Gordon Brown and his political spin doctors over the great bank bailout plan. Bold and innovative, Britain is said to have set the blueprint for everybody else, and now they are all dashing to keep up. Really? I see very little evidence of it.

Jeremy Warner: Oligarchs, Mandelson and Osborne

Wednesday, 22 October 2008

The Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska has rather weightier matters to worry about right now – such as, with credit markets still closed, where he's going to find the money to refinance the $4.5bn (£2.7bn) he borrowed to buy a 25 per cent stake in Norilsk Nickel – but that hasn't stopped him playing centre stage in Britain's latest political bunfight.

Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Britain to spend its way out of trouble as borrowing soars

Tuesday, 21 October 2008

Labour wants to spend its way out of recession; the Tories want to cut taxes for small businesses instead. Ever since New Labour came to power, politics has been an homogenised mix of touchy feely, third way blandness, with little substantive beyond rhetoric, history and personality to choose between the two main parties. The economic downturn promises to produce a clearer differentiation once more.

Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Opec should be put out of its miserys

Tuesday, 21 October 2008

It seems like only yesterday that forecasts of $200 a barrel oil seemed almost plausible. As the price rose ever higher, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) was urged to turn up the taps or risk plunging the world into recession. Little serious effort was made to do so.

Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Prudential to rebuff fears over solvency ratios

Tuesday, 21 October 2008

Insurance stocks have taken a terrible battering over the last week – only partially reversed in a rebound yesterday – on suggestions from Goldman Sachs that some of them might be about to run into the same solvency problems as banks, prompting rights issues and slashed dividends. Mark Tucker, chief exec-utive of Prudential, plans a detailed rejection of this glum analysis in a conference call this morning to announce new business figures.

Stephen King: Memo to Gordon... think radical and dump the Bank's inflation target

Monday, 20 October 2008

Whisper it quietly, but it's just possible that the Bank of England's inflation target contains a fatal flaw.

We may not be in for a deep recession but the recovery will take some time

Sunday, 19 October 2008

The market roller-coaster has continued to roll and the world's banks are still figuring out what life will be like in the new era of austerity. On past experience, do not expect any significant recovery to take place in sentiment until some sort of turning point is in sight for the real economy, for, typically, share prices turn some six to nine months ahead of the economic upturn. For the moment, and I think this explains the blue funk of the markets in recent days, the upturn is not in sight. The banking problems will be fixed, messily to be sure, but fixed they will be. The economic problems have only just begun.

Let's beef up the Old Lady. The FSA is a lightweight

Sunday, 19 October 2008

Tory proposals for a renewed Bank of England role in City regulation are a good starting point for change

Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Bankers beware. Regulators are back in the saddle

Saturday, 18 October 2008

Worried about losing your job in banking? No matter. There are lots of them to be had in financial regulation. So says Adair Turner, the new chairman at the Financial Services Authority. One of the problems with the FSA, he says in declaring an end to "light touch" regulation, is that there are too few regulators and because they are not paid competitively, the best ones are easily poached by the firms they are meant to be regulating.

Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Governments must be bolder to prevent economic calamity

Friday, 17 October 2008

Bank reforms money market operations; Don't write off private equity quite yet

Economic Life: Now the banks are in order, the public finances will take a hit

Thursday, 16 October 2008

Now that some sort of order has been restored to the money markets (if not to bank share prices), expect the disorder to move to the public finances. There will be an obvious increase in public debt as and when the banks are recapitalised but this will be quite separate from the underlying rise in the deficit as spending continues to rise and tax revenues decline.

Jeremy Warner's Outlook: China syndrome fuels latest bout of panic in markets

Thursday, 16 October 2008

Recession: public debt to soar; Mark to market: don't shoot the messenger; Look who's talking on City pay

Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Problems aplenty emerge in the great bank bailout

Wednesday, 15 October 2008

There's a problem Houston – the Lloyds dividend; Don't bank on bounce back in bank shares; Sir Philip Green to capitalise on decade of debt

Sean O'Grady: Which kind of downturn?

Wednesday, 15 October 2008

Two million. That will be the headline unemployment number by Christmas. Whatever happens to the banking system, this rise in joblessness is already "baked in".

Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Banks made to pay a heavy price for taxpayers' largesse

Tuesday, 14 October 2008

Back from the abyss? For the moment at least, the UK Government's decision to attack the banking crisis with hundreds of billions of taxpayers' money is not only winning plaudits but it seems to be actually working. To succeed, it was always crucial that Europe and the US followed suit with their own recapitalisations and guarantees.

Stephen King: Lessons from the Great Depression of the 1930s have not been learnt

Monday, 13 October 2008

We are living through financial history of the tragic kind. As of Friday's close, America's stock market had declined in value by well over 40 per cent compared with its peak a year ago. Already, this ranks as the fifth biggest stock market decline since the 1920s, beaten only by the 1929 Wall Street Crash (and the ensuing Depression in the early-1930s), the technology collapse of 2000, the crash that occurred after the Yom Kippur War (and quadrupling of oil prices) in 1973 and, finally, the collapse in 1937/38 when war was breaking out all over Europe.

Jeremy Warner: The goalposts have shifted dramatically

Monday, 13 October 2008

This is momentous stuff. It's been clear for a long time that the crisis in credit markets is going to change banking beyond recognition, but not until the last few days have the jaw-dropping implications come to be fully understood. Banking the world over is about to become publicly controlled, with Europe and the US now intent on following Britain's lead in recapitalising beleaguered balance sheets.

Hamish McRae: Lessons of the banking bailout

Monday, 13 October 2008

There are two immediate and obvious lessons from the huge public sector recapitalisation of UK banks and the associated flooding of the money markets with liquidity by the world's central banks.

Economic View: What will it take for the markets to see we have the weapons to resist disaster?

Sunday, 12 October 2008

Does the share collapse change everything? Or is it a classic market panic, such as occurs every generation – as irrational as the euphoria that precedes it?

Margareta Pagano: These bankers don't deserve to keep their jobs

Sunday, 12 October 2008

The top executive directors of the eight banks that could take part in the Government's rescue plan were paid £72m between them last year. That's nearly £2m each. Many of them earned far, far more but this is the average. Over the same year, shareholders in most of those banks – namely Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS and Barclays – have lost their shirts. And let us not forget, the shareholders who invested in Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock, who have been wiped out by this banking calamity. In those cases, the chiefs left, albeit with big pay-offs.

Jeremy Warner's Outlook: More action needed as market crash threatens meltdown

Saturday, 11 October 2008

Crash, bang, wallop. Is this capitulation, the point at which the last bull turns tail and flees before the marauding bears? Only a fool would attempt to call the bottom when a crash is in full motion. Nobody can know how low the stock market will go.

Credit crisis diary

Saturday, 11 October 2008

Three cheers ... oops we don't have time

Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Politicians play the blame game, but everyone is culpable

Friday, 10 October 2008

Ronald Reagan once famously described a recession as when the guy next door loses his job. A depression was when you lose yours. The recession bit is already well on the way. They've taken their time, but all the lead indicators now point to a nasty and possibly quite prolonged recession.

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