The choice of Richard Hughes as next chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility will be a critical one for the Boris Johnson era. Covid-19 had turned Britain’s budgetary verities on their head. In wartime, extraordinary levels of borrowing and debt are acceptable, as predecessor Robert Chote intelligently pointed out in Commons testimony at the … Read more
The rapidity with which a pandemic can transmogrify into a financial crisis, blocking the plumbing of the monetary system, is outlined in graphic detail by the Bank of England’s markets chief Andrew Hauser. In a Bloomberg speech, he reveals that as the moving vans were idling outside Threadneedle Street – with Mark Carney leaving the … Read more
Last December’s election, the exit from the EU on January 31 and the colossal damage being done to the UK and continental economies by Covid-19 have done little to take the edge off the Brexit divide. The manner in which the discredited management of Nissan chooses to use its Sunderland plant as a political pawn … Read more
ALEX BRUMMER: It’s time for chancellor Rishi Sunak to fire up the boosters By Alex Brummer for the Daily Mail Published: 22:30 BST, 2 June 2020 | Updated: 23:21 BST, 2 June 2020 We are living through extraordinary times and the combination of Covid-19 and the lengthy lockdown make it hard to read too much … Read more
ALEX BRUMMER: Interim FCA boss Chris Woolard would boost his long-term job prospects by unveiling some post-Woodford reforms By Alex Brummer for the Daily Mail Published: 21:51 BST, 1 June 2020 | Updated: 22:16 BST, 1 June 2020 The Financial Conduct Authority’s interim chief executive, Chris Woolard, is in overdrive. He has taken command of … Read more
ALEX BRUMMER: No one can look at troubles inside the EU with any equanimity – it is the UK’s biggest trading partner and a critical market By Alex Brummer for the Daily Mail Published: 22:22 BST, 29 May 2020 | Updated: 22:22 BST, 29 May 2020 As the world faces the deepest slump since the … Read more
Boris Johnson’s government has made many startling missteps as it has sought to manage the coronavirus pandemic. Some have been understandable; this is a new virus and the havoc wreaked, unprecedented. Others have been the result of incompetence or complacency. There is one ‘misstep’, however, that stands out as profoundly stupid. That‘s the decision to … Read more
ALEX BRUMMER: China tightens the noose on Hong Kong with British firms in line to feel the squeeze By Alex Brummer for the Daily Mail Published: 21:50 BST, 28 May 2020 | Updated: 22:12 BST, 28 May 2020 The worst fears of Hong Kong’s richest person Li Ka-shing, proprietor of trading behemoth Hutchison, are being … Read more
Successive governments, since the Thatcher years, have lived in fear of the state taking stakes in troubled private sector firms. Northern Rock in 2007 and the financial crisis of 2008 changed that, when only the state was capable of preventing financial Armageddon. The allergy dates back to the Wilson governments of the 1960s and the … Read more
There is a terrific scene at the movie The Big Short, based on Michael Lewis’s brilliant book on the financial crisis, where the director Adam McKay imagines a different ending. Instead of the Wall Street bankers who caused the crash escaping to their luxury Florida villas and yachts, the FBI arrives on the trading floors … Read more