Jeremy Warner

Profile: Full name: Jeremy Warner Area of interest: Business, economic and financial affairs Journals/Organisation: The Daily Telegraph Email: jeremy.warner@telegraph.co.uk Personal website: Website: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/jeremy-warner Blog: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/author/jeremywarner Representation: Networks: https://twitter.com/#!/jeremywarnerUK

Biography: About: One of the UK's leading business and economics commentators Education: Career: Worked at The Independent since its inception in 1986. Moved to The Telegraph in July 2009 Current position/role: The Daily Telegraph's assistant editor also writes/has written for: Other roles/Main role: Other activities: Disclosures: Viewpoints/Insight: Journalists don't reveal their sources. Accept it - At worse, sources' lives are threatened. They may also get jailed, fired, sued, or all three - The Independent, 19th July 2003 Broadcast media: Video: Controversy/Criticism: In 1988 he was fined £20,000 in a high profile case (brought to court under the 1986 Financial Services Act) for refusing to devulge sources in a story about purported insider trading by Department of Trade and Industry civil servants. He was asked by the judge if he thought he was “above the law” and replied: "Journalists do not stand outside the law. But they feel they must adopt the principle of confidentiality throughout their dealings with people and must suffer the consequences if, as a result, they are brought into conflict with the courts." (source: Press Gazette, back issues 20th Feb. 2003, see 'page of opinion') For context see: British Press Freedom Erodes Under Thatcher, Critics Say By Howell Raines, The New York Times, 19th December 1987 Awards/Honours: Has won numerous awards, incuding (in 1996) a special award from the British Guild of Newspaper Editors for "an outstanding contribution in defence of the media" for his refusal to disclose sources in a high profile Government investigation Scoops: see above Other: Grandson of the classicist Rex Warner

Books & Debate: Latest work: Speaking/Appearances: Debate:

The Daily Telegraph: Column name: Remit/Info: Business, economic and financial affairs Section: Business Role: Pen-name: Email: jeremy.warner@telegraph.co.uk Website: Commissioning editor: Day published: Regularity: Column format: Average length:

Articles: 2012 Are the Germans destined to save the euro? - It is an article of faith in Berlin that the single currency must survive, whatever the cost - 18th May Britain must make ready for the storm as clueless Europe tears itself apart - Once every half century or so, Europe "tears itself apart" in an orgy of self-destructive national tribalism. It happens just like clockwork - 17th May Brace, brace. Dark times ahead as Greece heads for the exit - European policymakers are about to commit another major blunder in their handling of the eurozone debt crisis, and this time it could well be fatal - 15th May Germany can't save the euro - The currency could not survive Greece leaving it - 11th May Europe's delusional search for growth - More than three years have passed since the Bank of England embarked on the emergency measure of quantitative easing - 10th May The big bucks won’t stop here - Three chief executives have resigned after falling out with institutional investors. But talk of a 'shareholder spring’ and an end to ever-rising fat cat pay is fanciful - 9th May The web's about creating vast wealth for the few, not jobs for the many - Don't bother with the lottery, or even the fast buck attributes of finance; design an app. It'll make you richer. Much, much richer - 8th May Sir Mervyn King: More right than most, but still badly wrong - Sir Mervyn King wants a legacy of reform, but it is his failings that will be best remembered - 4th May Even Chancellor George Osborne would shy from eurozone austerity - David Cameron has described the euro crisis as not yet even halfway through, a statement that may variously be regarded as either far too optimistic or, as the shadow chancellor Ed Balls sees it, a desperate attempt to blame the eurozone for Britain's own home grown economic malaise - 30th April Europeans will never accept a federal banking system - Hope springs eternal when it comes to efforts to save the euro - 27th April Osborne can stop the rot, but only by spending as he slashes - By swinging the axe in the wrong places, the Chancellor risks years of further stagnation - 26th April What next for the euro if France rejects austerity? - What on earth is going on with our money? - 24th April Osborne is envied abroad - Britain is seen by the IMF to be doing better than most - 20th April This crisis cannot be resolved while monetary union remains - "One has the feeling that at any moment, things could get very bad again.” With these words, Olivier Blanchard, the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, has set the tone for this year’s spring meeting of the IMF - 19th April IMF still won't admit truth about the euro - It is often said that travel broadens the mind. Not so for finance ministers gathering in Washington DC this week for the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund and G20. For them, the agenda will seem wearily familiar - 17th April Time to put the doomed euro out of its misery - Europe can’t accept that the economics of the single currency condemn it to failure - 13th April Please, no more help for 'zombie' mortgage holders - According to William Taft, the 27th US President, there is no individual right, other than liberty, more important than property - 12th April Why a Brics-built bank to rival the IMF is doomed to fail - Brazil, China and India have little in common apart from opposition to Western control of global financial institutions - 30th March Roll up for Britain's £750bn corporate cash mountain - As a general rule of thumb, big companies only shed or otherwise destroy jobs; it's small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that create them. It is therefore to SMEs that we must look for economic salvation - 29th March Why the economy is starting to look up - Nearly five years into the financial crisis, and with another UK Budget come and gone, it is worth taking stock and asking afresh where we have got to on the road to recovery - 27th March Budget 2012: George Osborne has forgotten the first rule of tax reform - One of Kenneth Clarke's more memorable sayings was that he gave up on tax reform after discovering that whatever you did as Chancellor by way of fiddling around with the tax burden, you would create as many losers as winners; politically you would always be punished by the losers while gaining no credit whatsoever from the winners - 23rd March The Chancellor’s long walk to recovery - George Osborne had little to offer that might stimulate growth - 22nd March Budget 2012: Does Plan A still exist? - First impressions on Budget statements are often misleading. With that proviso in mind, here goes anyway - 22nd March This is no way to meet Britain's looming infrastructure challenge - Founded nearly two centuries ago, the Institute of Civil Engineers, just off Westminster Square, is a place steeped in Britain's proud history of infrastructure development - 20th March We simply can’t afford to pay for our old age - Britain must learn to be self-reliant again before the country's triple-A rating is lost - 16th March Britain's inflationary route to default - George Osborne’s idea of refinancing the national debt with 100-year gilts, or even gilts issued in perpetuity, is a bit too clever by half - 15th March We may be going to hell in a handcart, but it has little to do with absent credit - Let's get banks' lending to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) into perspective - 13th March Britain can do without a Pol Pot of banking - We do not need an investment bank run by Vince Cable - 9th March Just what we didn't need - the return of rising mortgage rates - Government hopes of falling inflation and a consequent return by the end of the year to real terms income growth are being threatened by a potent combination of rising oil prices and increased mortgage costs - 8th March Budget 2012: George Osborne must resist calls to go radical - With mounting pressure from across the political divide for the Chancellor to deliver fireworks in the Budget, both in terms of tax cuts and a strategy for growth, what should he do? - 6th March Euroland will pay for this monetary madness - The flood of cheap money from the ECB is storing up grave trouble for the future - 2nd March The UK tax system has reached breaking point - There have been almost as many memorable sayings about taxation over the years as about marriage, divorce and religion. Everyone knows the one about there being only two certainties in life – death and taxes. Here are a few others - 1st March Five tests that saved Britain from the fate of economic oblivion - The judgment of history is unlikely to be kind on Britain's former prime minister, Gordon Brown, yet amid the wreckage it is sometimes forgotten that some things he did in fact get right - 28th February Firms will hire if we make it easier to fire - The US is showing Britain how to create jobs – everything else we’ve tried has failed - 24th February Stock markets show there are signs of optimism amid the gloom - Reasons abound for continued gloom about the world economy – the apparently intractable eurozone crisis, extreme imbalances at the heart of the Chinese economy, the possibility of another oil price shock, I could go on – but for the moment at least, they don't seem to be worrying stock markets - 23rd February Stock markets show there are signs of optimism amid the gloom - Reasons abound for continued gloom about the world economy – the apparently intractable eurozone crisis, extreme imbalances at the heart of the Chinese economy, the possibility of another oil price shock, I could go on – but for the moment at least, they don't seem to be worrying stock markets - 23rd February US proves that the brutality of hire and fire really does work - Ed Balls, the shadow Chancellor, has called for a £12bn tax cut in next month's Budget - 21st February US economy is stepping on the gas - Employment, profit and car sales figures are looking much brighter across the Atlantic than in Britain - 18th February Britain out of the woods? Unwise to bet on that - There was no doubt about it. The mood has very definitely improved, with a growing sense of moving in the right direction and even the worst being behind us - 16th February Credit agency clowns are making life difficult for the Chancellor - Moody’s has identified a weakness in Mr Osborne’s strategy - 15th February Greece faces death by a thousand cuts unless it leaves the euro - Lucas Papademos was suitably apocalyptic. If the terms of the second Greek bailout were not approved, the Greek prime minister warned over the weekend, there would be a "disorderly bankruptcy that would create conditions of economic chaos and social explosion" - 14th February Euro crisis averted? Don’t believe a word of it - Greece may be clinging on, but the eurozone’s real problems remain resolutely unaddressed - 10th February More QE is barking up the wrong tree - If not now, then surely sometime soon? Undeterred by now widespread bewilderment over how Quantitative Easing is meant to work in reviving the economy, or even whether it works at all, the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee is about to order another £50bn to £75bn bout of it - 9th February Why the 'Glenstrata' alliance should not be allowed to stand - "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 - 7th February Will the great interest rate gamble pay off? - By flooding the system with 'free’ money, the central banks could be storing up trouble - 3rd February What has the Government done for British business? - A knighthood stripped, a bonus given up, a punitive tax regime, excessive regulation and a botched trade mission to India... - 2nd February Is the West finished? Perhaps not quite - For me, the defining image from Davos this year was the sight of Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, holding up an expensive-looking, designer leather holdall and saying: "I am here with my little bag to collect a bit of money." - 31st January Can the Germans stop being German? - Angela Merkel will eventually be forced to accept the inevitable - 27th January It's now up to China to save capitalism - It's official. Britain is sinking back into recession. OK, so technically we are not yet in one - 26th January Davos can't work miracles but it may see the start of one - It’s Davos week, and despite a programme packed with distractions for the elite of world finance, business and public policy, there’s only one thing participants really want to talk about - the eurozone debt crisis - 25th January The IMF is no longer serving its purpose - To save the eurozone, it needs to dispense tough love, not endless bail-outs - 20th January Dong! Rip-off Britain makes its return - What goes around comes around. If Ed Milliband's declaration of war on "rip-off Britain" sounds strangely familiar, that's because it is - 19th January When, oh when, will Europe face the truth? - Countries with a triple-A credit rating are becoming an endangered species - 18th January The eurozone needed a French downgrade like a hole in the head - Just as markets had started to believe that the eurozone crisis was in retreat, along comes the credit rating agency, Standard & Poor’s, to remind everyone that the crisis hasn’t gone away at all, but has only been taking an extended Christmas break - 14th January Britain could hold on to its place in the world after all - At the height of empire, Britain accounted for somewhere between 15 and 20pc of global output in manufactured goods - 12th January This crisis in capitalism exposes Labour’s limitations - There was no apology or admission of fault from the Labour leader Ed Miliband - 11th January Can the euro survive another year? - The eurozone debt crisis has started the new year as it no doubt means to go on – with an inconclusive summit, an irrelevant commitment to a financial transactions tax (or Tobin tax), and another bizarrely anomalous event in money markets - 10th January We need to start again on private pensions - Ministerial meddling and tax raids have created a crisis – yet all hope is not lost - 5th January

Articles: 2011 Euro crisis blocks the path to full economic recovery - The year ahead looks gloomy, but quantative easing and inflation across Europe should prevent a full-blown depression - 29th December The sad death of multi-lateralism makes way for a more sinister trend - Like much of what passes as agreed policy in Europe these days, the deal announced only last weekend to address the eurozone's gathering debt storm is fast unravelling - 16th December Forget David Cameron's veto, another eurozone crisis is only weeks away - Leaders in the European Union will not take the measures towards fiscal union that would save their ailing economies - 14th December All were complicit in RBS's tale of hubris - When I first came into financial journalism, there used to be something called "the forty-year rule" - 13th December Eurogeddon – fear not, it's under control - Well that's a relief. According to Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, we can all stop worrying about the potentially catastrophic consequences of a euro break-up because it's not going to happen - 9th December Globalisation has turned on its Western creators - From the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements of the US to the rise of populist politics in Europe, the globalisation backlash is everywhere - 8th December Euro enters the last chance saloon - Ever since central banks agreed to provide additional liquidity support to Europe's stricken banks, stock markets have been surging in anticipation of an eventual, much wider ranging deal to save the euro. Are they right to do so? - 6th December Germany remains oblivious to apocalyptic warnings - Extraordinarily serious and threathening...perilous – these are not the sort of words a central banker normally uses, yet every time the Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, appears in public these days, he ramps up the language of crisis still further - 2nd December Debt Crisis: US rescue act is a sign of the mess we’re in - For the eurozone, it was another humiliating turn of events. Faced with Europe’s abject failure to sort out its own mess, the US Federal Reserve has been forced to come riding to the rescue instead - 1st December The British economy just got worse - As Osborne made clear in his Autumn Statement, Britain is facing many more years of misery - 30th November It's payback for longest boom in history - Bleak as the OECD's latest "Economic Outlook" seems, with its prediction of a double-dip recession for both the UK and the eurozone, it more likely understates the risks than overstates them - 29th November Death of a currency as eurogeddon approaches - It's time to think what hitherto markets have regarded as unthinkable – that the euro really is on its last legs - 25th November The eurozone crisis - an opportunity for Britain? Don’t bet on it - Whatever happens next in Europe, David Cameron is highly unlikely to win back significant powers over fisheries, agriculture or the budget - 24th November 'Them and us' mentality now colours eurozone's relations with UK - If the euro goes up in smoke over the next year, then one thing is certain; it'll be the City that is held responsible - 18th November Don’t blame the ECB for Europe’s failures - Sir Mervyn King had good reason to leap to the defence of his friends in Frankfurt - 17th November How to harness ultra low UK interest rates - Europe may be living through its "toughest hour since World War Two" (Angela Merkel), but you'll be pleased to know that Britain has become safe haven in chief, a kind of beacon of hope and shelter for international money amid the financial and economic turmoil of the Continent - 15th November The euro is being held together only by fear - There has been a lot of "thinking the unthinkable" over the past week. If the euro is ultimately unsustainable, why not just face up to reality and let this grand exercise in political hubris go? - 11th November If the eurozone implodes, Britain will go with it - Unless Germany acts soon, this country could find itself going the way of Italy - 10th November Britain is still too inward looking to succeed - In a recent assessment of so-called "spillover" risks from the UK, the International Monetary Fund drew up a map of the world which resized countries to reflect their external assets and liabilities - 8th November ECB President Mario Draghi cuts the euro's last lifeline - Anyone thinking that the arrival of Mario Draghi as president of the European Central Bank might herald a change in approach to the eurozone debt crisis would have been sadly disappointed by his first public appearance in the new role on Thursday - 4th November The euro tragedy is reaching its bloody end with Greece - Only the new head of the ECB can prevent disaster – but will he do what’s needed - 3rd November UK GDP a sideshow to euro doom - The looming catastrophe in the eurozone overshadows UK's GDP surprise - 1st November Good luck Mr Draghi - you will need it - We've been here before. Back on July 21, markets rallied sharply after a similarly nail-biting summit in Brussels to the one we saw this week - 28th October Eurozone debt crisis: can the European ideal survive? - Whatever grand plan leaders come up with to solve the eurozone debt crisis, it will create as many problems as it solves - 26th October Devaluation is no panacea for the UK - It's not generally realised, but over the past four years, the pound has experienced its sharpest depreciation since Britain left the gold standard in 1931 – much bigger than more memorable devaluation episodes such as the deceipt of Harold Wilson's pound in your pocket or the UK's ignominious exit from the ERM - 26th October Italian bond yields reach point of no return - As the UK discovered to its cost during its ill-fated membership of the ERM, it is tough to impossible to be in any form of currency union with Germany - 21st October Britain can’t save Europe, but we might still save ourselves - The eurozone debt crisis is beyond the Continent’s leaders. Chancellor George Osborne needs to prepare for the worst - 20th October Europe's grand plan risks slow death by a thousand cuts - Is Europe's planned programme of banking recapitalisations going to work? - 14th October Coalition fiscal policy is under scrutiny because, for all the talk, we’re no nearer to the end of this economic crisis - Labour's attack on the Government's economic policy is misguided, as decisive action is needed to lift both Europe and the wider world out of the mire - 13th October Banque de France turns a blind eye to European financial crisis - Crisis? What crisis? To judge by a speech in Tokyo last week from Christian Noyer, Governor of the Banque de France, you would never have guessed there was an almighty financial implosion going on at the heart of the eurozone - 10th October Willie Walsh is right - we're talking ourselves into a crisis - If big firms could be persuaded to spend cash stockpiles, our economic woes would be ove - 6th October UK has become a nation of zombie companies - When it comes to supporting UK manufacturing, the Coalition government's record has so far proved almost as disappointing as the last one's - 29th September Europe must grasp this chance to turn off the doomsday device - The G20’s 'grand plan’ is far from perfect – but it could buy the time to defuse the euro crisis - 29th September Recession pre-baked as Eurozone dithers - According to Winston Churchill's definition, a pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity, while an optimist will always see the opportunity even in the darkest of catastrophes - 27th September George Osborne’s not for turning, even though the numbers don’t add up - The euro crisis gives the Chancellor an opportunity to recast his deficit reduction strategy - 22nd September Why central banking needs a total rethink - Most of the financial reform debate has understandably focused on the future of banking, with the case for root-and-branch change apparently proven beyond doubt by the advent of a second credit crunch in Europe and the latest, shocking instance of rogue trading at UBS - 20th September Will German indecision on the euro drag the whole world down? - Monetary union hasn’t worked, but Germany, Europe’s strongest nation, won’t face the consequences - 15th September Bells and whistles, but to what purpose? - All three main political parties are in favour of it, and according to an opinion poll published in the Financial Times, there's wide ranging public support, too, so what's to object to? - 13th September 9/11: How Osama bin Laden caused our banking meltdown and financial crisis - When historians look back on the financial and economic turbulence of our times, they will date it not from the start of the banking crisis in 2007, but to the bursting of the technology bubble at the turn of the century, or perhaps even earlier to the height of the Asian financial crisis in 1998 - 9th September The wrong reforms will break the banks - The public must be saved from more bail-outs, but the Independent Commission on Banking's plans must handle the industry carefully - 8th September Is the world doomed to suffer another Depression? - The West is staring into an economic abyss deepened by political paralysis in the US and EU – but Britain must stick to its financial Plan A - 7th September Please, no more QE until really needed - As near as makes no difference, Britain and much of the rest of the developed world seems to be back in or at least heading towards some form of renewed recession, if indeed it was ever out of the last one. So has the time arrived to wheel out the fabled Plan B? - 5th September Mind the gap; bonds signal a depression - Another day, another stomach churning fall in stock markets - 19th August Osborne must brace for euro road crash - It won't happen at tomorrow's meeting in Paris between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, where saving the euro will again focus on peripheral issues such as the need to underpin already agreed measures with governance and structural reform - 16th August If only fixing Britain were quite so simple - I'd never thought I'd say this, but I actually found myself significantly in agreement with the economic analysis given by Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, during Thursday's emergency parliamentary sitting – well some of it, anyway - 12th August Can anything douse the economic flames? - A global solution must be found to put out the fires that threaten our economies - 11th August European Central Bank paralysis sparks global crash - As central banks around the world scramble for measures to fight a fast slowing global economy, the single currency's sovereign debt woes have again moved perilously back to centre stage, causing stock markets to plummet and investors to run for the hills - 5th August Whatever George Osborne believes, Britain will spend years in the doldrums - Plunging bond yields do not signify a recovering economy, but quite the opposite - 4th August What's left to trust in the world of money? - America's inability to address its fiscal challenges – Sunday night's "bipartisan debt deal" offers only a temporary, sticking plaster solution – has raised afresh an old conundrum - 2nd August China's economic miracle may be about to come off the rails - Largely invisible to a radar screen dominated by concerns over the US and eurozone debt crises, the Chinese economic miracle, one of the few apparent bright spots that remains in a world beset by trouble, has in recent weeks also been showing unnerving signs of strain - 28th July Where is George Osborne? Like Macavity, he's not there - The Chancellor's ability to float above the wreckage of the Coalition's first, turbulent year in office, is one of the more remarkable features of today's UK political scene - 26th July Eurozone debt crisis: Remorseless logic takes Europe closer to fiscal union, but this crisis is far from over - If Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the ECB, had been planning on his usual break in La Rochelle this summer, he might as well cancel right now - 22nd July Angela Merkel: can she rescue the euro? - Germany doesn't have to subsidise its southern neighbours to save the single currency - 20th July Europe descends into monetary madness - Perhaps it’s crisis fatigue, but monetary policy in Europe seems to have descended into madness - 8th July The Government's energy policy leaves everyone in the dark - Chris Huhne's plans to increase private investment in British energy look hopelessly optimistic - 7th July Lessons of Argentina crisis ignored in handling of Greece - For a vision of how the Greek debt meltdown is going to end, look no further than the IMF's post mortem into a similar crisis that came to a head almost exactly a decade ago - Lessons From The Crisis In Argentina- 5th July Is the UK following Japan into a 'lost decade'? - At Nissan's headquarters in Yokohama, just south of Tokyo, the air conditioning is setpermanently on 26 degrees. It's hot and sticky outside and it would be nice to have things a little bit cooler. Regrettably, it's not an option - 4th July The IMF has turned into Obama's poodle - With disaster in the eurozone once more postponed, if not vanquished, markets are again turning to the US in their never-ending search for trouble - 1st July BIS report: The West must stop living on the never-never - There comes a point where attempts to stave off disaster do more harm than good - 30th June China must change for the world to prosper - Good news for poultry farmers; the ban on exports to China is being lifted. Good news all round; some £1.4bn of trade agreements with China were announced yesterday to coincide with premier Wen Jiabao's visit to Britain - 28th June Why Britain can't live with borrowings on the scale of Japan's - With all eyes focused on Europe's unfolding fiscal crisis, I've spent the past week on the other side of the world in Japan - 24th June Britain should save the euro – and then cash in - Full fiscal union would allow us to profit from Europe, even as we sat on the sidelines - 23rd June Greece's ace card: help us or we'll take you all down - Rarely have the goings on of the Greek parliament commanded so much international attention. Once a complete irrelevance, its machinations, and in particular its apparent refusal to accept austerity, have assumed centre stage - 18th June Will keeping bankers apart put an end to bail-outs? - George Osborne, the Chancellor, hopes to protect taxpayers’ money by ring-fencing retail banking. It’s a flawed plan - 16th June It's not necessary to destroy finance to deal with its unacceptable face - What does the corporate governance row at Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) have in common with the near collapse of the care homes group Southern Cross? - 14th June We’ve used up all our options, so what next for Britain's economy? - The British and US economies have failed to recover, despite our most desperate efforts - 10th June The scandalous way thrift is still losing out to profligacy - At almost every level, public as well as private, Britain is massively in debt - 9th June The missing ingredient in economic policy is a convincing growth strategy - The Government needs to get a grip. Anyone would think Britain had plunged back into the depths of recession to judge by the near hysteria which seems to have enveloped the deficit reduction debate over the past week - 7th June Look, even Sweden charges for healthcare - It is madness to keep the NHS free at the point of use when other spending is being cut to the bone - 27th May It's ever more obvious, Greece must leave the euro - I've hardly been alone, but that's no excuse. For more than a year now, I've been regularly predicting the euro crisis's final denouement, yet still it hasn't arrived - 26th May How the euro crisis end game might look - After the fiasco of Collateralised Debt Obligations, anything the clowns of the credit-rating agencies have to say about Europe's sovereign debt crisis deserves to be taken with a sack full of salt - 24th May At last, a policy that’s better than a bail-out - The restructuring of debt offers Europe an alternative to endless, ineffective hand-outs - 20th May Brown would be a hopeless IMF chief - Gordon Brown is nothing if not doggedly persistent - 19th May Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the single currency's cuckoo in the IMF nest - It gives me no pleasure at all to jump up and down on Dominique Strauss-Kahn's grave. Nor should we yet presume him entirely dead - 17th May A scandal that David Cameron will struggle to shake off - It's hard to be optimistic about No 10's package of measures to tackle youth unemployment - 13th May Euro meltdown eclipses UK travails - Well there's a surprise. Over the past several years, the Bank of England's quarterly inflation reports have fallen into a wearily familiar pattern, which the latest one shows no sign of breaking - 12th May Cavalier finance industry has killed the incentive to save - The causes of Britain's poor savings rate are doubtless many and varied, but right up there at the top of the list has to be an age old problem – why would anyone want to save with a financial services industry whose modus operandi seems to be to feast on the gullible and fleece the ignorant? - 10th May Chris Huhne needs a lesson in economics - Plundering the profits from North Sea oil will only hold back Britain's recovery - 5th May UK is not Portugal, but it could become so - And then there were three. For the UK, there could scarcely be a more salutary warning of the dangers of runaway public debt than the sight of Portugal joining Greece and Ireland in economic enslavement to the faceless bureaucrats of Europe and IMF - 5th May Why the power of the mighty Federal Reserve is finally on the wane - It is only right that central banks, having messed up so monumentally, are made more transparent and accountable - 29th April UK economy slides towards Japanese-style funk - Another set of subdued GDP figures has begged an old question: is Britain turning into Japan? The difference between the two economies is in many respects still so great as to make the question seem almost laughable - 28th April The painkillers are wearing off, for many the real recession starts now - The waiting is nearly over. Gross Domestic Product for the first quarter is announced on Wednesday – rarely has the data caused so much anticipation - 26th April The 'other' housing market, where house prices have regressed 60pc - An apartment on London's Hyde Park recently changed hands at an astonishing £136m - 21st April US and EU political resolve cracks in the face of fiscal ruin - Credit rating agencies should never be taken too seriously, but for Standard & Poor's to put the United States on "negative outlook" is none the less something of event - 19th April Who will save America from drowning in debt? - Both political parties have failed to come up with any credible plan to solve this crisis - 15th April There's no pain-free escape from trouble - It's less than a year into the new Parliament, and already the Government's flagship National Health Service reforms are under review; might the same soon be true of economic policy? Only over George Osborne's dead body - 7th April Households sink under a sea of debt - All eyes will be on Marks & Spencer for its fourth-quarter trading update on Wednesday for a glimpse of what's happening at one of the coal faces of the UK economy - 5th April Is the cost of saving the euro beyond reach? - Japan’s earthquake is sending shockwaves through Europe’s political structures - 1st April Dereliction of the Big Four blamed for financial crisis - As with most man-made catastrophes, the financial crisis had multiple different causes which were then compounded by a bungled policy response - 31st March Get ready for more shocks from soaraway utility bills - I'm not sure UK consumers yet fully appreciate what's about to hit them in terms of rising utility charges. Never mind higher oil prices - 29th March Britain's £200bn time bomb of debt interest - A little bit of inflation is a good thing, right? Well, that's one way of looking at it, and if you were being charitable, it might even provide a decent explanation of why the Bank of England appears to have given up on the inflation target - 25th March George Osborne wasn't allowed to give us the Budget we really needed - The constraints of the Coalition left the Chancellor indulging in sleight-of-hand polic - 24th March ies Budget 2011: A taxing matter for George Osborne - The Chancellor, George Osborne, has won plaudits from international peers for the determined way in which he's addressing the road crash in the public finances. Now he wants to add a further achievement to his office – the prize of radical tax reform - 22nd March Japan's economic crisis could be ours, too - Major countries all face the triple blow of debt, an ageing population and energy insecurity - 18th March An OECD love-in, but where's the growth? - No wonder the Chancellor, George Osborne, was keen to hold a joint press conference with Angel Gurria to announce the results of the OECD's latest health check of the UK economy - 17th March Why mountainous public debt won't constrain Japan's recovery - Watching the images of destruction in Northern Japan, it's easy to imagine an economic catastrophe to match the human one - 15th March A harsh message about Europe's future - The Continent’s economies face a common problem, and drastic action is needed - 11th March Europe serves up another charade on bank stress tests - Anyone familiar with the Byzantine complexities of European policymaking would not have been surprised to learn that the latest round of EU bank stress testing is going to be – well, about as testing as the last one, which famously found both Allied Irish Banks and Bank of Ireland to be perfectly solvent - 10th March UK's wanton destruction of the City - Don't worry. I'm not about to write a column in praise of bankers, and nor do I want to attack Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, for daring to speak out about Britain's latest sub-species - 8th March BSkyB bid: Bending the rules for Rupert Murdocha fair-weather friend - Ministers will regret giving Rupert Murdoch such a free hand with our media - 4th March Intellectual Property reform cannot be dictated by Google - As we have been reminded by events this week, David Cameron can be a very impressionable fellow - 3rd March America not yet down and out, or how the West is still winning - It's nearly one hundred years since Oswald Spengler penned his best selling "Decline of the West". Its theme has been a favourite among writers, historians and economists ever since - 1st March If the Saudis revolt, the world’s in trouble - The fate of the global recovery rests on events in Riyadh - 25th February Ireland's in a state of denial over the euro - Ireland goes to the polls on Friday to elect a new parliament, from which eventually a new government and Taoiseach (prime minister) will emerge - 24th February The uncertainty over oil is a slippery slope - The last time the oil price lost touch with gravity, which it threatens to again with the price of Brent crude now well north of $100 a barrel, it helped tip the world economy into the deepest recession since the 1930s - 22nd February Why Angela Merkel and David Cameron see eye to eye - The British and German leaders have forged a seemingly unlikely alliance - 18th February Mervyn King should embrace the 'futile gesture' - If people begin to think that the Bank is no longer committed to the inflation target, then it is game over for monetary credibility - 17th February China should enjoy its triumph while it lasts - For China finally to have overtaken Japan as the world's second largest economy is a moment more important for its symbolism than its underlying significance - 15th February Banks should look to Munich, not Project Merlin - Six pages of waffle won't restore public trust in banking - 11th February Housing is in need of some shock therapy - "Lord make me chaste, but not yet". I've used this famous prayer by St Augustine many times before in commenting on the public policy response to the credit crunch, and make no excuse for citing it again - 10th February The cult of equity is dead, long live equities - How has the "cult of equity" stood up to the trials of the credit crunch? - 8th February If we're lucky, we'll only be 10 per cent poorer - The world’s economic cycle is no longer moving in the West's favour - 4th February Watch out: oil still has the power to shock - It's impossible to know where the political turmoil in Egypt and the rest of the region might end, but one thing it has already done is further drive up the oil price, threatening to wreak havoc with the still fragile recovery in many advanced economies - 3rd February Ten reasons for economic optimism - News that the UK economy shrank by 0.5pc in the fourth quarter of last year has sparked renewed doubts over the sustainability of the recovery and the wisdom of the Government's deficit reduction strategy. As an antidote to the gloom, here are 10 reasons to take a more positive view - 1st February China’s progress is to be lauded, not feared - The emerging superpower is not the threat we perceive it to be - 28th January Why George Soros is talking nonsense - This week's shock fourth-quarter GDP figures are a harsh reminder that the British economy remains in distress - 27th January The Tories’ complicity in our economic meltdown - Ed Balls has hit the ground running since taking on the role of shadow chancellor. It’s only five days since poor old Alan Johnson was stretchered off, but already the new man on the pitch seems to be everywhere - 25th January Putting growth before inflation will ruin us - The Bank of England's realm is in economics – it should stay out of social policy - 21st January Myth and reality in world energy famine - As on most things, economists disagree – sometimes violently – on the question of whether apparently ballooning global demand for energy can be met in an economically sustainable way - 20th January Can BP tame the Russian bear this time? - The tie-up with Rosneft is BP's third attempt at dancing with the Russian bear. On both prior occasions, the company has ended up badly mauled - 18th January America must keep the door open to China - A siege mentality is gripping the US as Obama welcomes Hu to the White House - 14th January UK is not yet ready for demise of finance - For me, the best bit of Bob Diamond's grilling before the Commons Treasury Committee - good theatre but completely uninformative - was when he was asked the "philosophical" question of why it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven - 13th January The biggest threat to growth is public policy - One of the positives to emerge from the banking crisis was the way in which it galvanised countries across the globe into a common policy response. It seemed to work. A depression was averted. Output for the world economy as a whole is back above pre-crisis levels and growth is again strong - 11th January Imbalances between East and West will grow and grow - "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop", Herb Stein, President Nixon's economic adviser, once said in one of those statements of the blindingly obvious which has since assumed the status of Delphic wisdom - 7th January Inflation flies up, up and away - Food prices, utility bills, clothing and other costs are soaring, and thanks to the rise of the developing world, things won't be getting better any time soon - 6th January Jeremy Warner predictions for 2011: US comeback, eurozone debts a bigger threat and Vince Cable moves on - Columnist Jeremy Warner expects the US to return as an engine or growth - at a cost - in 2011, with UK inflation and Europe's woes continuing to unsettle and change for a lame-duck Business Secretary - 4th January

Articles: 2010 For many, it'll be a very unhappy financial new year - It will only need a small nudge to tip some households into destitution - 31st December Crisis of confidence in Threadneedle Street - Rising inflation is no surprise, so why did the Bank of England fail to predict it - 16th December We approach a defining moment for Europe - Germany will not abandon the no bail-out clause – a big decision looms for the EU - 9th December UK must take a leaf out of Barack Obama's book - President Barack Obama seems at last to be joining the real world- 9th December Germany will save the euro, but at a price - While the eurozone’s free-spending fringe suffers, the mood in Berlin is upbeat - 4th December 2010 Britain is still way down the G20 list - The Coalition likes to think of itself as a radical reforming government. Well maybe it is, but it's hard to apply that description to the latest rag-bag of proposals for corporation tax reform - 2nd December Europe's threat to UK economic recovery - Will the euro survive its dark night of the soul, and what, with the OBR confirming a relatively upbeat set of forecasts for the UK, does the current turmoil in markets mean for Britain, still partially insulated from the travails of the eurozone by the “luxury” of its own currency? - 30th November Is inflation now beyond the Bank's control? - Mervyn King is powerless to halt the damage to savings and spending power - 26th November Germany wallows in 'golden autumn' - Behind the unfolding horror story of Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain, something is stirring in Europe which promises a rather better future than the grim, crisis-ridden headlines of the moment might suggest - 25th November This bail-out blackmail must be stopped - Taxpayers cannot be expected to pay for all the banks’ bad debts - 19th November How to avoid debt bail-outs - As we learned to our cost at the height of the credit crunch, when a "too big to fail" bank goes bust, political leaders are faced with a choice that really amounts to no choice at all - 18th November Euro crisis: Britain is vulnerable in this vicious cycle - The euro is in deep crisis with little hope of a happy ending – even for the UK - 16th November Ireland has been betrayed by its EU 'friends’ - The country is now effectively bust – its brutal cuts will have been in vain - 12th November Crunch time approaches for world economy - There was a belated admission from Mervyn King on Wednesday; ignore the Inflation Report, he seemed to be saying, because its forecasts may amount to no more than tomorrow's chip paper - 11th November Markets alert for credit crunch 2.0 - Is there a second credit crunch looming? Between now and the end of 2012, UK banks and building societies must find ways of refinancing between £750bn and £800bn of lending. That's a number approaching half GDP - 9th November The age of the dollar is drawing to a close - Currency competition is the only way to fix the world economy - 6th November Fed's $600bn gamble risks throwing away America's biggest asset - Apparently, there's been an election in the US. The BBC tells us that America's wholly unsurprising verdict on the past two years is frightfully important and signals the end of the Obama dream, whatever that may have been; it was never entirely clear - 4th November US Federal Reserve's latest bubble threatens mayhem - The prospect of more quantitative easing (QE) is driving government bond yields to levels that price in a depression - 2nd November Mervyn King must turn off the printing press - Quantitative easing will do little to secure the recovery - 29th October The Fed is fuelling the catastrophe of fast rising raw material prices - Is the world running out of food, alongside oil, metals, water and much else? - 28th October Double dip? Don't bet on it - "Where is the growth going to come from – where are the jobs going to come from?" These were the questions which David Cameron sought to address in his speech to the CBI annual conference yesterday - 26th October Spending Review 2010: George Osborne insists Britain sober up - The Chancellor's departmental spending cuts are lower than he was aiming at. Will they be big enough - or are they too much for a fragile economy? - 21st October Spending Review 2010: Whether shower or hurricane, George Osborne's cuts will leave us cold - So just how draconian is Wednesday's Comprehensive Spending Review going to be? - 19th October Declaring war on the bankers won't get us out of this mess - By attacking the bankers, the Government is taking on the very people who can lift us out of our economic crisis, says Jeremy Warner - 15th October Do banks really need all this extra capital? - First Deutsche Bank, now Standard Chartered. One by one, bankers are moving to pre-empt the imposition of tougher capital rules by raising new equity from investors - 14th October Jobless America threatens to bring us all down with it - A depression may have been averted, but nothing has been fixed. This is the depressingly downbeat message that came across loud and clear from last weekend's annual meeting of the IMF - 12th October A year on, the smug mood at the IMF turns sour - Gloom has descended over the IMF's annual meeting in Washington - 7th October Imbalances threaten new global meltdown - Global imbalances; the International Monetary Fund has been wringing its hands over them for as long as anyone can remember - 7th October Britain, be warned: Ireland's budget deficit is now 32 per cent - Ireland's misfortunes are a cautionary tale for Britain – let's just be thankful we have our own currency - 1st October Are we heading for a replay of 1930s? - "We are in the midst of an international currency war", Guido Mantega, Brazil's finance minister, declared this week. There's no quarrelling with the analysis - 30th September Catastrophe of UK's infrastructure cuts - If flogging dead horses is your particular penchant, you'll have much in common with Sir Nigel Rudd, chairman of BAA - 28th September Don't meddle with our right to buy a home - Tighter rules on mortgages will take ownership out of the reach of millions - 23rd September Vince Cable must focus on investment, not retribution - Downing Street was right to be "relaxed" about Vince Cable's speech, billed by the press as an anti-capitalist rant; there was little in it worth getting worked up about - 23rd September Barack Obama's roadblock on the road to recovery - Over the weekend, the US authorities declared BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico "effectively dead". As is now apparent, the social, economic and environmental costs of the disaster, while not to be underestimated, have proved far from the outright catastrophe of recent media and political imagination - 21st September China has no choice but to look inside itself for growth - Self-sustaining domestic growth in China is a necessity, not a chioce - 16th September The West needs to hope that China can live up to its hype - Rewind two years, and advanced economies were on the verge of being plunged into the worst economic contraction since the Second World War. Yet for China and much of the rest of the Asian region, the downturn barely registered - 14th September Why banking reform will remain timid - Tut, tut. As if the appointment of Bob Diamond as chief executive of Barclays was not insulting enough to the banker-bashing consensus, it is reported that HSBC too may be about to opt for the leadership of a wicked investment banker - 9th September Bob Diamond: Polished – or Flawed? - The appointment of Bob Diamond as Barclays CEO has caused a stir in the City, but you just can't keep a good man down - 8th September Coalition must not lose nerve on deficit - Tempting though it might be to regard the Labour leadership contest as largely irrelevant, there are two reasons for thinking otherwise - 7th September Barack Obama is locked in a lose-lose situation - The president seems incapable of tackling either unemployment or the deficit - 4th September Markets ruled by extreme mispricing - Here's my holiday resolution; I'm selling the house and piling the proceeds into Greek government bonds - 2nd September Central bankers are gearing up for another dose of quantitative easing - Like the rest of us, the grand mufti of monetary policy return from their holidays this morning to the grim reality of a still profoundly damaged world economy - 31st August Osborne hit the ground running, but can he stay the distance? - The Chancellor has confounded critics in his first 100 days in office, but there is much to do - 14th August Bank of England turns blind eye to elevated inflation - Mervyn King is destined to become arguably the most powerful man in Britain once he adds prudential oversight of credit markets to his existing responsibilities for interest rate setting – and indisputably the most powerful when it comes to matters economic - 12th August Mervyn King should stop complaining about bank lending and try more QE - In a recent appearance before the House of Commons Treasury Committee the Governor of the Bank of England said he found the supposed reluctance of the banks to lend to small and medium sized enterprises "heartbreaking" - 10th August It's not Saint Vince Cable's job to make takeovers work. It's up to shareholders - Those who glumly proclaim that nothing has really changed as a result of the crisis – other than to make the already disadvantaged even more so – will find further support for their view in the Government's decision to lay aside all radical thought and stick with a largely non-interventionist approach to mergers and acquisitions - 5th August Should banks be allowed to make a profit? - The bail-out has been a success, but there must be a limit to state intervention - 4th August Alan Greenspan is making UK weatherman Michael Fish look like a good forecaster - Alan Greenspan appears to have taken to heart the old adage that "if you can't forecast well, forecast often" - 3rd August Whatever happened to the rebalancing act? - Without the right policies, our economy is condemned to more crises - 30th July Are UK banks killing the economic recovery? - Time for a spot more of Britain's favourite sport? Yes, indeed; next week brings first half results from virtually all the top UK banks, and therefore abundant opportunity for renewed banker bashing fun - 29th July Is a double-dip recession heading our way? - Many experts are predicting a double-dip recession. That is avoidable, but this recovery will hurt - 23rd July Watch out, the great £50bn property unload is about to begin - Banks are ready to purge unwanted commercial property from their balance sheets as part of the normal boom and bust cycle - only this time around the world has changed - 22nd July Mind the gap: why the bond markets are signalling a depression - Something potentially momentous has happened in financial markets in the past two months - 8th July Why European banks' stress tests and GCSE exams have far too much in common - We should all know the results of the stress testing of European banks later this month - 6th July Britain's unique selling point is the English language - William Hague is getting his priorities right - 3rd July Will the world suffer a double-dip recession? Only if we talk ourselves into it - The prophets of doom are out again in force. Over the past week, "double dippery", or extreme negative market and economic sentiment, has once more taken centre stage - 1st July It's 'negflation' that Britain really needs to worry about - Beyond the meaningless posturing of the G20 communique – apparently, even the US is now committed to deficit reduction – there were two, perhaps rather more important stories from the weekend press to digest, and I'm not talking about England's World Cup thrashing - 29th June 2010 Barack Obama is refusing to listen to reason on economic policy - President Barack Obama could learn from the old-fashioned German habit of saving money before spending it - 24th June Budget 2010: get a sense of proportion – the cuts are not that deep - In recent years, most post-Budget analysis has focused on the inadequacy of the Government's plans for dealing with the deficit - 24th June Budget 2010: George Osborne makes it sound relatively painless. It is not - Well done. Try as you might to pick holes in George Osborne’s first Budget, it is hard – given the daunting size of the challenge – not to be impressed - 24th June 2010 The spill is bad, but BP's PR is even worse - The rich vein of anti-business sentiment in the US is being fuelled needlessly - 19th June UK faces life in the economic slow lane - So is the outlook for the deficit really so much worse than we were led to believe, as claimed by both David Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne? In double quick time, the Government's new Office of Budget Responsibility has crunched the numbers and perhaps disappointingly for Mr Osborne come to the conclusion that in some respects – er - no it isn't - 15th June Gulf of Mexico oil spill: The gun-slingers have BP in their sights - An enforced break-up of the company is a real possibility - 12th June Budget 2010: what are George Osborne's options in this emergency? - The challenge for George Osborne’s first Budget in 12 days is to find measures that will convincingly eliminate the structural deficit while at the same time giving the country a reasonable chance of economic growth - 10th June David Cameron is right: unless tackled the deficit will become very dangerous - A little while back, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, warned that we are still only halfway through the world's worst ever financial crisis - 8th June Don't blame BP – Gulf of Mexico oil spill is America's fault - Like the banking crisis, the oil disaster will see in a new age of state intervention - 29th May Why EU paralysis threatens the US too - With a name like Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary is presumably of German or Dutch ancestry. He ought therefore to have a better understanding of the word "Schadenfreude" than most. In marked contrast to the financial chaos that has descended on Europe, Mr Geithner's own backyard looks relatively well ordered right now - 27th May Austerity is the new cool as Europe turns its back on Keynes - Au revoir to haute couture, and adieu to Michelin starred dining. A new fashion is sweeping Europe – the hair shirt and daily diet of thinnest gruel. According to Britain's new Chancellor, George Osborne, it is a trend in which the UK plans to be "a leading force" - 25th May The Bank's error is in Britain's favour - An appalling forecasting record might save us from the worst - 22nd May Shooting the messenger won't save the euro - Counter-productive policy-making on the hoof is what Europeans seem to do best right now, so it should come as little surprise to see the Germans shoot themselves in the foot by attempting to ban short selling and credit default swap trades on sovereign bonds - 20th May UK economy is stuffed – but not as badly as Greece - You can hardly blame George Osborne for over-egging the point. Gordon Brown was still trying to blame the Tories for all the ills of the world 13 years after they were swept from power, as if his own mismanagement of the economy in the meantime might not have had a little something to do with it - 18th May The face of Europe is now changed for ever - The financial crisis that has engulfed the EU will not be solved by any quick fix - 15th May Free at last, Bank's King speaks his mind - In Europe, there's international rescue, while here in Britain there's a sudden outbreak of peace, harmony and mutual understanding between previously warring political parties, and in our imaginings at least, a degree of political stability has returned - 13th May As Britain fiddles, Europe is still burning - Try as they might, neither the electorate nor the markets seem able entirely to kill him off. The way things are going, it will require a military coup finally to get rid of Britain's beleaguered prime minister - 11th May General Election 2010: Our politicians are powerless as the tide of debt rises ever higher - When it comes to the economy, Britain's fortunes are largely in foreign hands - 7th May (General Election 2010) Our medicine is going to be very unpleasant - The policies needed to cut Britain's deficit are too awful to be discussed - 1st May Europe's dithering on debt threatens to power up the financial doomsday machine again - Europe's debt crisis should carry a health warning for Britain - 29th April BP oil disaster: banks should learn a thing or two in handling a crisis - The oil industry's handling of disasters holds useful lessons for banks - 27th April General Election 2010: The markets know the truth, but voters don’t want to hear it - None of the parties has a credible plan for dealing with debt. Soon they will have no choice - 23rd April West confines itself to economic slow-lane - The global economy is looking up, and as ever, events have left the International Monetary Fund struggling to keep up - 23rd April Gordon Brown's shock mea culpa on banks shows he'll get it all wrong again - Gordon Brown's self congratulatory form of mea culpa on banks shows only that he still hasn't fully grasped the lessons of the banking crisis - 15th April A make-believe debate – but a real choice - Two very different visions of our economic future are emerging - 10th April Fed boss Greenspan says no one saw the crisis coming. Really? - Only in America. Only in America would it be possible to spawn a financial crisis so devastating that it would collapse the entire world economy - 8th April On business, all three main parties fall short - And they are off. But for business and the City, this is not a race that will be watched with any great enthusiasm - 7th April BSkyB: robber baron or national treasure? - The ultimate ambition of all business, it is sometimes said, is not to serve society, but as with the board game of the same name, that of monopoly - 1st April Barack Obama faces potential Chinese death trap - Newly emboldened by his successes with health care reform and nuclear disarmament, what next for Super-Obama? - 30th March Strikes and strife are only just beginning - Britain has not woken up to the enormity of the spending cuts on the cards - 27th March Budget 2010: The painful truth that Alistair Darling failed to mention - Drastic measures will be required – whoever wins the general election - 25th March Taxing the banks won't help the economy but taxing business less just might - Bank-bashing wins votes – it's possible to date Labour's poll revival almost exactly to its - 23rd Marchannouncement of the banker bonus tax last December – so it should come as no surprise as we approach the general election to see the main political parties engaged in an unseemly competition to inflict the most damage on the City Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winner who threatens the world - Paul Krugman, an American economist, wants to start a trade war with China. It would be worse than the 1930s - 20th March Labour is about to hit the point of diminishing returns on taxing Britain - Don't expect next week's Budget to contain any great surprises - 18th March History suggests that the winners from a recession tend to win big - The story is possibly apocryphal, but at the height of the Guinness affair in the mid-1980s, Ernest Saunders, the soon to be disgraced Guinness chairman, is said to have been called to a crisis Sunday morning meeting in London - 16th March Painless recession is Gordon Brown's killer app - As the election approaches, the PM is in a 'win, win’ situation - 13th March What do we want from the NHS? - We pour money into the NHS, but not addressing today's challenges has left it lagging behind other countries - 12th March Currency devaluation needs new export markets on Mars to prove a panacea - Currency adjustment has once again moved centre stage. Here in Britain, with a general election of ever more uncertain outcome looming, we worry about the possibility of a sterling crisis - 9th March Greece is a harbinger of austerity for all - The effects of the stimulus are wearing off, leaving us with a nasty hangover - 6th March Sterling crisis might break Britain's political and economic paralysis - Currency markets are calls to action. No party has yet had the courage to articulate a credible plan for deficit reduction - 4th March Recovery? Who are you trying to kid? - We are in a deep hole – and it looks like we’ll be down there for quite some time - 27th February Gordon Brown pledges a low debt economy, should we laugh or cry? - Dear, oh dear. At a conference of business leaders in London yesterday, Gordon Brown set himself the goal of "re-establishing Britain as a low debt economy" - 23rd February Economic policies look impotent in calming the storm - It is still too soon to talk of another bear market, but nobody could have failed to notice that over the past month the great stock market rally of last year has run out of steam -18th February Sticking plaster won't solve the euro crisis - Without help, the euro will eventually be brought down by its weakest members - 13th February Inflation takes back seat in Bank of England's recovery drive - Anyone expecting Bank Rate to be on the way up again by the end of this year would not have found much support for this view in Wednesday's quarterly Inflation Report from the Bank of England - 11th February Eurozone 'pigs' are leading us all to slaughter - The financial crisis is coming to a new, potentially more deadly phase - 6th February Capitalism has forgotten to share the wealth - The benefits of growth have been captured by far too few people - 30th January 2010 Davos 2010: the arrogance of bankers risks reversing finance's role in creating prosperity - 28th January (Davos) Davos 2010: Get ready for the multi-speed world of opportunity - Jeremy Warner says the rethink and rebuild theme at Davos has hit the right note, he sees a new world of opportunity amid the uncertainty - 27th January Why do we need to end boom and bust? - There is a risk that the wrong kind of reform could lead to stagnation - 23rd January Why stock markets are still undervalued - Somewhat worryingly, given how bearish professional investors were when the market was down in the dumps, surveys show the predominant mood now to be overwhelmingly bullish - 19th January Barack Obama's tax on banks is disingenuous - Only structural reform breaking up the banks will prevent another crisis - 16th January If a bank's too big to fail, break it up - The lesson of the financial crisis is that if banks are too big to fail, they should be broken up. Unfortunately, it may need further upheaval for the policy makers to see sense - 12th January Time is running out for make-believe economics - The markets have already realised that Britain's deficit is unsustainable - 9th January Interest rate rises may come sooner than you think - To QE or not to QE? This is not an issue for this week's meeting of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, which will keep things ticking along as before, but at some stage soon the Bank of England must decide when and how to start removing the extraordinarily accommodative monetary conditions that have ruled for the last year or more - 7th January Britain yet to face the psychological pain of its new economic status - Nobody brave enough to have joined the hordes at London's Brent Cross shopping centre over the past week or two would have believed that we have just been through the deepest economic recession since the 1930s - 5th January We forget the lessons of the past at our peril - Of course it's impossible to predict the future, but history can help - 1st January

Articles: 2009 We can't afford to drive the City away - It's the High-street banks which have cost us billions - not international financiers - 19th December Banking work-out will weigh for years - Few events give a better understanding of the collective mood in the City than the Governor of the Bank of England’s annual Christmas drinks party - 17th December Bond price crash is the surest bet in town - Past performance, all financial advisers are obliged to tell you when seeking to stuff your hard-earned nest egg into the latest investment fashion, is no guide to the future - 15th December Pre-Budget report: You'd think we want to drive bankers away - The tax on City bonuses is a bad idea and risks alienating an industry we need - 12th December Pre-Budget report: PM's spending assault fails to cut the mustard - Few political promises are more meaningless than that of waste elimination in public spending. Yet it doesn’t seem to stop politicians from constantly pretending that front line spending can somehow be kept intact by simply getting to grips with government bureaucracy and excess - 8th December Gordon Brown's U-turn on tax is a sad pantomime - Attacking the wealth of 'the few' could be profoundly damaging to Britain - 5th December Should we really be gunning for bankers? - They make an easy target, but where would we be without them - 4th December City more threatened by Britain's political masters than Sarkozy and Brussels - London's position as one of the world's premier financial centres has been the envy of Paris for generations - 3rd December Dubai: don't count on a happy ending - Does Dubai amount to no more than another aftershock from a banking crisis which is now largely behind us, or does it signal the beginnings of a new financial earthquake? - 1st December If countries like Dubai begin to fail, who will save them? - Dubai's plea this week for debt deferment could just be the thin end of the wedge - 28th November Britain has run out of money, the CBI is told - When the CBI met for its annual conference a year ago, the world economy was still staring into the abyss. Since then, we seem mercifully to have pulled back from the brink. Most major economies are already technically out of recession. Britain is expected to have joined them by the end of the year - 24th November Brown's financial delusions will cost Britain dear - The PM still won't admit that too much state spending is economically destructive - 21st November What makes a boss a winner? - Marc Bolland and Archie Norman have been hailed as saviours of M&S and ITV – but how can we tell - 20th November Why Obama faces a brush off from China - Henry Ford, the founding father of twentieth century mass production, is perhaps best known for his invention of the moving assembly line. Less well appreciated is his other major contribution to the consumer society; if you want a mass market for your products, you have to pay your workers enough to buy them - 17th November Currency devaluation is no magic bullet - We can't rely on the falling pound to lift Britain's economy out of recession - 14th November Car makers are stalling, and it's partly my fault - Car makers have been hammered by the recession - their future looks bleak - 7th November It's the economy, stupid, not asset prices, that should worry us - Dark clouds gather physically and metaphorically as the G20 finance minsters come together in Fife - 5th November This recession means we are sliding towards the developing nations - The legacy of the financial crisis will be some painful economic and social changes - 31st October Market for banking assets is about to get crowded - Don’t thank the Government for the promised new wave of competition in high-street banking. Instead praise Neelie Kroes, Europe’s firebrand competition commissioner, for attempting to use the massive quantities of state aid heaped on banks as a way of reversing decades of self-serving consolidation - 29th October Britain isn't working. Here's 10 ways to help restore growth - It will be a long time before we know for sure if the shock 0.4pc decline in third-quarter GDP announced last week gives an accurate picture of what's going on in the UK economy. Later revisions may show it to have been an exaggeration - 27th October Be bullish about house prices – for now - Money is cheap – but affordable mortgages won't last for ever - 24th October The City is doomed if the politicians carry on like this - The posse of assorted regulators, governments, politicians and enraged members of the general public galloping after the bankers, still even in these straitened times making off over the hill with their bag loads of lucre, grows larger and noisier by the day - 20th October There's a sense of recovery in the air - Labour's legacy may not be quite as poisonous as predicted - 17th October Back to madness as spreads return to pre-crunch levels - Search for yield is back, and this time it may be really serious. I'm not talking only of the bounce in equity prices, which may or may not be justified by prospects for economic recovery, but of a less visible search for yield which is lowering the price of risk across a whole range of asset classes, from high-yield emerging market and corporate debt to property and even the much-derided "toxic" detritus of the credit crunch, asset-backed securities - 15th October Britain's 'energy gap' is down to ministers, not market failure - Britain's energy policy has been a mess for almost as long as anyone can remember. On the evidence of two reports published over the last week, one from Ofgem, the energy regulator, and the other from the Committee on Climate Change, it is not about to get much better - 13th October A strike will be the last post for Royal Mail - A more insane state of affairs for an industry in precipitous structural decline than a strike over Christmas is hard to imagine - 10th October The Tories are still struggling with their economic message - The Conservative Party under David Cameron has never been strong on the economy - 8th October The reality behind Istanbul co-operation is a global economic policy split by self-interest - We seem to have retreated from the precipice, but what does this brave new, post-financial crisis world hold for the future? - 5th October East is taking over from West in an irreversible shift of economic power - The IMF's choice of location for its annual general meeting this year – Istanbul – seems more than usually appropriate. Only a little while back, Turkey was being bailed out with multi-billion dollar loans - 4th October What happens when the borrowing stops? - For all the talk of recovery, the future looks grim for our public finances - 3rd October IMF's credit-constrained vision of the world economy is the wrong bet - Does anyone really believe the alarmist numbers which the International Monetary Fund insists on airing for the scale of the bad debt problem in financial markets? - 1st October Governments can survive recessions, but not in this case - Democratically elected leaders can and do survive recessions. For proof, just look at Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. Does her example offer any hope to Britain's beleaguered Prime Minister, Gordon Brown? - 29th September The dollar is dead - long live the renmimbi - Whatever happens at the G20, the days of Western dominance are at an end - 26th September Thanks to a devalued pound, Britain may soon be in surplus on trade - Few things are more resonant of the changed, post crisis world we are about to enter than the now strong possibility that before long Britain could bizarrely find itself alongside Germany, China and Japan with a strong current account surplus. Before choking on your cereal in laughter at this apparently ludicrous suggestion, read on - 24th September Why much of the G20 debate on banking reform is futile - What do we want from our banks? The answer might seem fairly obvious - 22nd September Gordon Brown's global quest for re-election - The Prime Minister is calling the tune, but will G20 leaders listen - 19th September Growth holds the key to reversing Britain's fiscal ruination - The truth will always out in the end. Thanks to a leak of confidential Treasury papers to George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, we now know that the Government is indeed going to have to cut departmental spending sharply over the next four years to stay within the parameters it has set for the public finances - 17th September Lehman collapse: A year on, one wonders what all the financial crisis fuss was about - Call it the great escape if you like, and certainly whisper it softly, but just one year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers it is looking ever more likely there will be no direct cost to the taxpayer of the banking bail-outs and perhaps even a profit - 15th September How the collapse of Lehman Brothers averted a second depression - It’s about time the self-serving myth about Lehman Brothers was exploded - 12th September If Cadbury were French, the Kraft bid wouldn't be allowed - When PepsiCo dared to suggest it might bid for Danone three or four years back, Gallic leaders rallied to the French diary giant's defence - 10th September Public or private, excessive debt must eventually be lanced - Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet. So says the famous prayer by St Augustine. It seems to have been followed to the letter by the G20 finance ministers in their communiqué last weekend - 8th September Bank reform is easy – if only policy-makers were a little braver - Reform of banking will once more top the agenda for finance ministers meeting in London on Thursday, ahead of the main gathering of G20 political leaders in Pittsburgh later this month - 3rd September Moment of truth approaches as grand mufti return to work - Is the sharp rally in stock markets since their low points last March for real, or just an aberration in a prolonged bear market which still has months if not years to run? I guess we are about to find out - 1st September Germany's rapid recovery might be a mirage - Europe has only delayed the pain - 15th August How the Bank came to get things so wrong about the crash - The Bank's credibility and authority have been greatly undermined by the events of the past two years - 11th August Cable may need to change his tune as Armageddon fades - Lib Dem MP seems to want full vindication of his apocalyptic vision, however unpleasant this ground zero world would be for the rest of us - 6th July Bankers are getting away with murder - Our savings and taxes are being used as a piggy-bank for the City - 1st July Alistair Darling gets it in the neck again, but is he really such a bad Chancellor? - Is Alistair Darling a good or a bad Chancellor? I ask this question because it sometimes seems to me that he deserves a better press than he gets - 29th July It's the office boys who are driving this holiday season rally - Why is the stock market going up when the economy is going down? The answer might seem self evident; it is because rightly or wrongly investors are looking through the present economic gloom to a durable recovery a year or two hence. Yet the answer to this somewhat simplistic question demands a more nuanced answer than that - 28th July Britain is tiptoeing away from the abyss - If there is one thing we have learned from the financial and economic crisis of the past two years, it is that most economic forecasting is complete bunkum. Nobody can predict the future, which by definition is uncertain, and I'm not about to try - 25th July City bonuses are being funded by a stealth tax on savings - Bank-bashing has always been a popular sport. Over the past two years it has been elevated into a universal obsession, yet little good does it seem to have done in taming the excesses of bankers - 23rd July Financial crisis threatens long-term injury to the economy - As the second anniversary of the credit crunch approaches and with another round of calamitous banking write-downs looming, it seems appropriate to revisit the question of what progress, if any, has been made in repairing Britain's profoundly damaged banking system. Can banks be weaned off publicly provided life support any time soon? - 21st July A catastrophe that could scar a generation - Legislation, tax and education must change if we are to survive - 18th July The goose that laid the Goldman egg could yet be killed by regulation - The name Goldman Sachs attracts admiration and loathing in equal measure. To some, the world's most successful investment bank is the very embodiment of the greed-fuelled frenzy that helped cause the banking crisis - 15th July Like Mr Micawber, Britain finds itself in a debtors' prison - "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” - 14th July The Bank of England's resolve will soon be tested - The vital moment of the crisis is approaching - 11th July Institutional shareholders should stop grandstanding and do their duty - Wednesday's vote at M&S instructing Sir Stuart Rose to split the roles of chairman and chief executive amounted to no more than completely pointless corporate governance grand standing - 9th July The City doesn't need any more rules - Everyone agrees that we must prevent our banks from failing ever again. But, says distinguished City commentator Jeremy Warner, who joins the Telegraph today, a mania for regulation is not the answer - 7th July

The Independent: Column name: *ceased contributing June 2009* Remit/Info: Business, economic and financial affairs Section: Business Role: Business and City editor Pen-name: Email: Website: Independent.co / Jeremy Warner Commissioning editor: Day published: Tuesday through to Saturday Regularity: Six days per week Column format: Average length:

Articles: Digital Britain is already a success. Why interfere? - Outlook: Whenever politicians talk with dewy-eyed conviction about the case for a new era of "industrial activism", it fills me with dread - 17th June 2009 (Final column) Stubbornly high inflation poses challenge for Bank - Outlook: Is it good or bad news that inflation is proving so resilient? - 17th June 2009 Banking crisis may end up costing taxpayers nothing - Outlook: Everyone wants better public services, but we've reached a point of disillusionment in the Government's ability to deliver them - 16th June 2009 Europe's banks still need plenty of medication - Outlook: Economic recovery is being hampered by lack of confidence in the eurozone banking system - 16th June 2009 Has anything really changed in banking as Barclays exits BGI? - Outlook: Would Barclays be disposing of Barclays Global Investors (BGI) at all, let alone at this stage in the cycle, were it not for the banking crisis and the need to raise more capital? - 13th June 2009 Rising bond yields point the way to economic recovery - Outlook: Government bond yields around the world are soaring as inflationary expectations rise and debt management agencies struggle to fund record peacetime fiscal deficits - 12th June 2009 West Bromwich saved for the nation? - Outlook: By persuading holders of £182.5m of subordinated loans to convert their debt into instruments that would qualify as core tier 1 capital, West Bromwich hopes to avoid enforced merger with someone else, or the even more unpalatable end of falling victim to the Government's shiny new special resolution regime, the fate that befell its sister building society up in Dunfermline - 12th June 2009 Recession may be over but not the pain - Outlook: All of a sudden, the green shoots of economic spring seem all around us. Some of them may even be turning into smallish shrubs, if not quite yet fully grown bushes - 11th June 2009 Bank needs true outsiders on financial stability - Outlook: Nobody is going to disagree too much with the four directors appointed yesterday from the Court of the Bank of England to the newly created Financial Stability Committee - 11th June 2009 Sky in the spotlight as Setanta teeters - Outlook: Ofcom's efforts to force BSkyB to make its sport and other premium content available to rival pay TV providers on a wholesale basis have been so long drawn out that whatever the eventual outcome, it will come too late to save Setanta - 10th June 2009 C&G pays the price for Lloyds banking merger' - Outlook: So farewell then Cheltenham & Gloucester, whose high street brand dates back to the mid-19th century but, like so much else, is now falling victim to the relentless march of "progress" – 10th June 2009 Horlick applies the due diligence to herself' - Outlook: Well there's a thing. The mystery bidder for Bramdean Alternatives turns out to be none other than Nicola Horlick herself, the "super-mum" who already manages the fund - 10th June 2009 Best not to count on those green shoots - The case for a double-dip recession is all too easy to make - 9th June 2009 Taxpayer gets £2.3bn payback from Lloyds - Outlook: Once confidence goes, there is almost no amount of capital that can guarantee a bank's safety - 9th June 2009 Tories must engage in Europe to defend the City - Outlook: The supposed government-in-waiting seems not properly to recognise the dangers - 9th June 2009 Rio Tinto – another lesson in the perils of empire-building - Outlook: The Chinese are fuming and some shareholders are still demanding Tom Albanese's head on a platter - 6th June 2009 (See also: Mining: summary) Sir Alan Sugar – you're hired! - Outlook: It seems unlikely that Sir Alan Sugar would be hiring Gordon Brown as his apprentice were the Prime Minister to appear on his TV show. Lacking in people skills, sulky, non-team player, makes enemies easily, and incapable of controlling a budget, Mr Brown would have been fired in the first episode - 6th June 2009 Ronson – Ernest's Alzheimer's was my idea - Outlook: Those who still wonder, as I have from time to time, about the origins of Ernest Saunders' Alzheimer's need look no further - 6th June 2009 Rio Tinto ditches its Chinese connection - Outlook: Now do keep up. A year is a long time in politics, to misquote Harold Wilson's famous remark, but it seems to be a positive aeon in the mining industry - 5th June 2009 Latvia must bite the bullet and devalue - Outlook: The sooner Latvia and other fringe European nations that peg their currencies to the euro grasp the nettle and devalue, the better it will be for both them and the Western banks that have recklessly been funding their growth - 5th June 2009 (See: Latvia rings alarm bell for Europe) House price correction is not over yet - Outlook: One swallow does not a summer make, and although there has been quite a lot of positive data on the housing market of late, it would be unwise to read too much into yesterday's unexpectedly strong Halifax house price survey - 5th June 2009 Tragedy of UK's system of final salary pensions - Outlook: First BP closes its defined benefit pension fund to new members. Now Barclays is closing its doors to new accruals too, which is the next stage on the road to closure - 4th June 2009 Temasek loses its touch on Barclays - Outlook: The Singapore sovereign wealth fund seems to have lost the plot. Unlike Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, who has just made a killing from his investment in Barclays, Temasek apparently chose the bottom of the market earlier this year to offload its stake in Barclays, thereby clocking up a loss on the investment of £500m - 4th June 2009 Dollar weakness is a sign that things are on the mend - Outlook: Remember the glory days of two dollars to the pound, when depending on how much they were spending, it almost made sense for Brits to hop on a plane and go shopping in New York? - 4th June 2009 Merkel slams Bank's loose money stance - Outlook: By demanding that the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England cease their programmes of "quantitative easing" forthwith, and that the European Central Bank avoids the temptation of adopting the same approach, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has broken one of the abiding principles of German politics: that out of respect for central bank independence, all commentary on their monetary actions is strictly off limits - 3rd June 2009 Abu Dhabi turns a fast buck on Barclays - Outlook: I was a fierce critic of Barclays' decision last autumn to ignore shareholder pre-emption rights by bringing in Middle Eastern investors on favourable terms to provide new capital - 3rd June 2009 Geithner attempts to calm economic relations with China - It would be easy for the US to slip back into the bad old ways of living beyond its means - 2nd June 2009 Is Balls the right man to replace fall-guy Darling? - Few Chancellors have been dealt such an overwhelmingly poor hand - 2nd June What's the point of the rating agencies? - Outlook: How dare they? Whatever the validity of the analysis, there are few things quite so guaranteed to get the juices of patriotic outrage flowing as the implied criticism of a threatened Standard & Poor's downgrade - 22nd May 2009 There's a thing: We've won the IMF's praise - Outlook: There was faint praise in an IMF report card issued yesterday for Britain's handling of the banking and economic crisis, not that this is likely to help Prime Minister Gordon Brown very much in his quest to get re-elected - 21st May 2009 Furse has had a good innings running the LSE - Outlook: For any chief executive to survive as long as eight years in the hot seat, as Clara Furse has done at the London Stock Exchange, counts as some kind of achievement in itself - 21st May 2009 (see also: Exchange looks to life after Clara) Myners wants to force investors to be more engaged - Outlook: Lord Myners, the minister for the City, made an appropriate stand-in guest speaker for the Investment Management Association's annual dinner the other night, because the man who was meant to give the speech was none other than John McFall, chairman of the very same Treasury select committee of MPs which has just issued a scathing report on Lord Myners' handling of Sir Fred Goodwin's pension. In it, Lord Myners is accused of naivety and failure to grasp the issue - 21st May 2009 Bank may just have got its sums correct - Outlook: To the relief of the Bank of England, which has no real need to justify itself over its policy of zero interest rates and quantitative easing, but was beginning to get a little worried about the apparent stubbornness of the inflation rate, price inflation is at last beginning to ease as projected - 20th May 2009 Dividend cut highlights M&S board's failings - Outlook: What a shame the dividend decision at Marks & Spencer doesn't conform with the slogan of its transformation programme – "doing the right thing" - 20th May 2009 Sir Victor falls on his sword at Lloyds TSB - Outlook: Even if the deal hadn't been done, the share price would still have been in the tank - 19th May 2009 Don't count on China to rescue world economy - Outlook: There's good reason for optimism about emerging market economies, not least India - 19th May 2009 Germany's noble objectives ill-suited to coping with meltdown - Outlook: We are all prisoners of our own history, it is sometimes said, and no more does this seem to be the case than in Europe's policy response to what is shaping up to be by far the worst recession of the post-war period - 16th May 2009 Lufthansa baulks at enforced BMI takeover - Outlook: When the economic winds blow as cold as they are now, companies like to huddle together for warmth. This ought to be instructing an explosion of merger activity, yet outside the banking sector there's been strangely little of it thus far - 16th May 2009 Pension deficit may force BT break-up - Outlook: What is to become of poor old British Telecom? It was only eight years ago that Britain's incumbent telecoms operator, groaning under a £30bn mountain of debt, had to be rescued from oblivion by what was then a record-breaking £6bn rights issue - 15th May 2009 Who are MPs to attack the City bonus culture? - Outlook: We have to assume that MPs on the Commons Treasury Committee are relatively clean, for none of the present crop seems yet to have appeared in The Daily Telegraph's exposé of MPs' expenses. Even so, the timing of their latest report on the banking crisis, which fulminates against the City bonus culture, could scarcely be more unfortunate - 15th May 2009 Intel gets it in the neck from Kroes - Outlook: You can get almost any merger past the European Union these days. The recession has also caused the rules governing state aid to be virtually scrapped. Yet at least one area of European competition policy remains reassuringly intact. Ploughing an ever more lonely furrow, Neelie Kroes, the European Competition Commissioner, has slapped a record-breaking fine on Intel. And there we all were thinking the one-time scourge of big business was going soft - 14th May 2009 Bank of England chief warns of slow economic recovery - Outlook - 14th May 2009 Still too early to call recovery, says HSBC - Outlook: Mervyn King must explain just how the Bank plans to withdraw from its high-risk experiment - 12th May 2009 HSBC sails on regardless - Outlook: Thanks to its size, HSBC seems to be emerging relatively intact - 12th May 2009 Centrica secures nuclear stake - Outlook: Britain's urgent need to invest in energy renewal makes Centrica's position special - 12th May 2009 Are bankers fleecing us again, or is this just repricing of risk? - Outlook: Just as everyone was beginning to think that the hoped-for economic spring may be for real, along comes Stephen Hester, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, and Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, to pour cold water on the whole notion - 9th May 2009 After Teesside, expect a lot more breach of contract - Outlook: With growing competition from the low-cost operators of Asia and Latin America, Teesside's days as a producer of bog-standard, commodity steel slab have long looked to be numbered - 9th May 2009 Printing money seems powerless to halt rise in gilt yields - Outlook: Proving the old stock market saying that it is better to travel in anticipation than actually to arrive, gilt yields fell precipitously ahead of the formal announcement of QE, under which the Bank of England is expanding the money supply by buying shed loads of gilt-edged stocks. But they have been rising steadily more or less ever since and after another surge yesterday, the yield on the benchmark 10-year gilt is now higher than before the programme began - 8th May 2009 Good bank, bad bank - Outlook: What could have possessed Lloyds Banking Group to rush out its interim management statement on the same day as first-quarter numbers from Barclays? The contrast between the two could scarcely have been more humbling - 8th May 2009 Treasury calls Tata's bluff over JLR guarantees - Outlook: The Government is right to play hardball with Tata Motors over £750m of aid being demanded to support Jaguar Land Rover - 8th May 2009 Women bankers are no protection - Outlook: Harriet Harman, Labour's deputy leader, would be well advised to read Gillian Tett's excellent new book on the origins of the banking crisis, Fool's Gold, before sounding off again on the merits of packing the boards of nationalised banks with women so as to protect us all from the supposed greed-fuelled recklessness of male bankers - 8th May 2009 City bashing won't help public finances - Outlook: Warren Buffett says his eyesight isn't so good these days, but even if it were fine, he doesn't think he'd be seeing too many green shoots. Even Lord Mandelson, unreconstructed optimist though he appears to be, sees no more than "green seedlings" - 7th May Fiat's marriage in heaven is triumph of hope over experience - Outlook: I'm sorry, but I just don't see it. Sergio Marchionne, chief executive of Fiat, is self-evidently an inspirational business leader with a superficially compelling vision for creating a global auto manufacturer of sufficient scale to survive and prosper - 6th May BAA would struggle with third runway - Outlook: Brave of all those high-powered business leaders to come leaping out of the closet to confess they have always been against a third runway at Heathrow, isn't it? - 6th May 2009 What now for the Monetary Policy Committee? - Outlook: The Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee begins its regular two-day monthly meeting today. With no interest rate decision to take – rates are already so low they cannot sensibly be cut further – the MPC may find itself struggling to fill the time - 6th May 2009 What do we want to do with our banks? - Outlook: This week's Treasury committee report on the banking crisis reserves some of its more biting observations for UKFI, the supposedly independent organisation established to hold and manage the taxpayers' various investments in the banking industry - 2nd May 2009 Informa swaps London for Zug in tax revolt - Outlook: Zug in central Switzerland, conveniently located within reach of some of the country's ritziest ski resorts, is no doubt a nice enough place for a visit. But is the publishing and events group Informa doing the right thing by relocating to this remote Swiss canton so as to avoid an estimated £10m a year in tax? Hands off our hedge funds, protection for private equity - Outlook: Once again, I find myself having to perform the unenviable task of defending the hedge fund and private equity industries. Populism nearly always makes for bad policy, and by pandering to the "locust" hating politicians of Paris and Berlin, the European Commission seems to be falling into just such a trap - 1st May 2009 Desperate and not so desperate rights issues - Outlook: As a textbook example of the way the credit crunch has been hurting ordinary companies, they don't come more striking than DSG International, the former Dixons electricals retailing group - 1st May 2009 Steel giants struggle under a mountain of deal-induced debt - Outlook: Sales down by a half, another $1bn-plus quarterly loss and a distress $3bn issue of new equity and convertibles to match. Anyone would think this another everyday tale of banking folk - 30th April 2009 BP and Shell struggle to keep up with Exxon - Outlook: Should BP and Royal Dutch Shell redomicile and relist to the United States? - 30th April 2009 Sorrell worries about fiscal threat to upturn - Outlook: It's not this year that Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the advertising giant WPP, worries about, or next. Rather it's what comes after when governments around the world are confronted by the brutal reality of what to do about the burgeoning fiscal deficits they are acquiring in trying to manage their way through the recession - 29th April 2009 BP's dividend looks safe enough - Outlook: So far, so good. The bumper profits reported by oil companies for last year, fuelled as they were by the sky-high oil price, were plainly not going to last into these recessionary times, so there had been fears that even the mighty BP would succumb to the dividend-cutting trend set by the rest of corporate Britain, depriving investors of yet another once-trustworthy source of income in an increasingly income-scarce world - 29th April 2009 No risk of default when inflation can do the job - Outlook: I'm ever more puzzled by a note from Moody's last week suggesting that the British Government's triple-A credit rating may be in danger if after the next election firmer action than envisaged in the Budget isn't taken to bring down the fiscal deficit - 29th April 2009 Competence, not ideology, is all that matters in economics - Outlook: There is an air of fin de siècle about the present wallowing around in the old ideas of big government and state activism - 28th April 2009 Even the boss is sceptical about GM's rescue plan - Outlook: If bondholders think they are getting a raw deal, what about existing equity holders? - 28th April 2009 Chancellor already in trouble on forecasts - Outlook: I may have spoken too soon earlier this week when I dismissed the IMF's forecast of a 4.1 per cent contraction in the UK economy this year as too pessimistic - 25th April 2009 Pensions muddle just gets worse and worse - 'Outlook: Not content with the mess it has already made of Britain's private sector pension arrangements, the Government seems intent on doing them even more damage in its desperation for new sources of tax revenue - 25th April 2009 A decade of pain looms as full horror story is revealed - Outlook: Even on the day, the Budget arithmetic looked bad enough. The day after the night before, it looks even worse - 24th April 2009 IMF is being unduly alarmist - Outlook: What with the Budget, I've not found space so far this week to engage in a favourite sport – IMF bashing - 24th April 2009 Grade should be calling it a day at ITV - Outlook: ITV is breaking one of the first rules of corporate governance practice by allowing Michael Grade, effectively chief executive for the last two and half years, to move seamlessly into the position of non-executive chairman - 24th April 2009 A bogus Budget that ducks the inevitable pain of spending cuts - Budget Outlook: In terms of its economics, this was undoubtedly one of the most unconvincing and wrong- headed Budgets of the modern era. Once everyone sees through this lack of economic credibility, it may not look politically that clever either, despite the usual bewildering array of classically Brownite "populist" measures - 23rd April 2009 Despite recession, Tesco juggernaut just keeps on rolling - Outlook: the recession and accompanying banking crisis, far from marking the beginning of the end for the Tesco growth story, is providing new opportunities that will further strengthen its position in the years ahead - 22nd April 2009 Recession? Some of us are living in clover - Outlook: If you happen to match the following profile – well-paid civil servant with big mortgage planning on buying a new house and car – then you've good reason to celebrate. Thanks to lower mortgage costs, your disposable income will be soaring - 22nd April 2009 Fine words, but where's the money going to come from? - Outlook: The age of government activism is back. Or is it? Once you've waded through the grandiose-sounding principles and statement of objectives, yesterday's government paper purporting to set out an industrial strategy for the future – New Industry, New Jobs: Building Britain's Future – doesn't add up to a hill of beans, or given its focus on creating "green-collar" jobs, one might even say a hill of green beans - 21st April 2009 Eddie George - a wise old bird remembered - Outlook: Few central bank governors get more than a footnote in the history books. Lord George's role in presiding over the first four years of independence for the Bank of England ensures more generous coverage. On a personal level he will also be fondly remembered by all who knew him - 21st April 2009 (Obituary: Eddie George) Bolstering confidence must be Chancellor's Budget priority - Outlook: It's always dangerous to double-guess the Budget this close to the event - 18th April 2009 Nemesis of the mutually owned building societies - Outlook: First, Dunfermline Building Society went bust; then Moody's downgraded the credit rating of nine smaller building societies, some of them to only just above junk; now a self-styled "whistle-blower" comes forward to claim that the Financial Services Authority had stood idly by while building societies expanded their lending into ever more risky areas and were "eaten alive" by avaricious investment bankers - 18th April 2009 Don't count on China to act as the locomotive - Outlook: As expected, the big emerging- market economies of Asia are proving more resilient to the global recession than the advanced, industrialised economies of the West and Japan. But can that resilience lift the rest of the world out of its funk? This seems rather less likely - 17th April 2009 Are these green shoots, or just the end of destocking? - Outlook: One of the main reasons international trade and industrial production have fallen off a cliff over the past six months is because of a massive and all-embracing inventory adjustment across all sectors of the world economy - 17th April 2009 How sustainable is the stock market bounce? - Outlook: There may or may not be a rapid bounce back in the economy, but the stock market, which tends to discount some way into the future, already seems to have made up its mind and is celebrating as if spring has already fully sprung - 17th April 2009 Pensions make easy target as Treasury gets desperate - Outlook: Don't expect next week's Budget to cast much light on where the spending axe is going to fall to repair the now disastrous state of the public finances - 16th April 2009 Who said investment banking was dead? Not Goldman Sachs - Outlook; Reports of investment banking's death seem greatly exaggerated to judge by the latest quarterly results from Goldman Sachs. OK, so the super-charged profits of two or three years back, when investment banking was firing on all cylinders, are gone, but Goldman is once again making good money in many areas of activity – particularly fixed income, currency trading and commodities - 15th April 2009 Rights issue money-go-round - Outlook: Having announced a $5bn equity issue, it took Goldman Sachs less than 24 hours to place the stock and bank the money. Compare that even to the truncated timetable recently agreed by UK institutional investors for the City's preferred method of raising new equity – the rights issue – and the British system is still found wanting - 15th April 2009 In search of housing market green shoots - Outlook - 15th April 2009 Japan may struggle to afford stimulus - Outlook: Unlike most of Europe, Japan seems to have no scruples about borrowing to spend - 10th April 2009 Bank break-ups may be good for shareholder value -Outlook: If an incoming Conservative government does decide to push the button and break up the banks, Royal Bank of Scotland has just the man to perform the necessary surgery - 10th April 2009 Is scrappage subsidy really such a great idea? - Outlook: The Government is now so widely expected to introduce such a scheme that if it doesn't everyone will want to know why - 9th April 2009 Tories may break up the banking goliaths - Outlook: Was this George Osborne's "neoclassical endogenous growth theory" moment? In a long speech yesterday to the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, the shadow Chancellor wheeled off a bewildering array of economic thinking and analysis to justify emerging Conservative Party thinking on the financial crisis and how to deal with its aftermath - 9th April 2009 Ireland's shock therapy has got its merits - Outlook: If Alistair Darling wants lessons in self correction, he could do a lot worse than study the details of the emergency budget outlined in Dublin this week - 9th April 2009 Public sector must follow private one in addressing pensions - Outlook: Tricky things, pensions, and getting trickier all the time to judge by the legion of British companies that are going to have to agree "recovery" plans with the pensions regulator over the coming months to address a shortfall in funding - 8th April 2009 PartyGaming goes straight - Outlook: PartyGaming was the biggest of a slew of online betting sites that floated on the London stock market four or five years back. What made these IPOs odd, to put it mildly, was that they were based on a largely illegal activity – namely that online betting was against the law in its biggest market, the United States - 8th April 2009 Few Budget options as public finances spiral out of control - Outlook: It would have been hard enough for Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, to get away with announcing a new fiscal stimulus in the Budget this month after the shot across the bows delivered a couple of weeks back by the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King - 7th April 2009 Shareholders back 'caring, sharing' HSBC - Outlook: Stephen Green, the chairman of HSBC, was introduced by Tony Blair a few months back at Davos as one of the few bankers left who still dared show his face during daylight hours - 7th April 2009 Havens crackdown won't fix avoidance - Outlook: Much trumpeting at the G20 summit in London this week of proposals to clamp down on tax havens, an agreement that was said to have been brokered personally by President Barack Obama - 4th April 2009 This housing correction has a way to go yet - Outlook - 4th April 2009 G20 communiqué gives some reason for optimism - Outlook: It's easy to be cynical about yesterday's G20 communiqué, which seems to borrow liberally from New Labour's extraordinarily irritating habit of adding together old or already known-about initiatives and then reannouncing them as somehow new - 3rd April 2009 Hedgies seem to have won a stay of execution - Outlook: Hedge funds are their own worst enemy. The secrecy with which they shroud their affairs invites public suspicion and condemnation - 3rd April 2009 What's the ECB's game? I'm sorry, I haven't a clue - Outlook: Deep and mysterious are the ways of the European Central Bank. Nobody can fault Jean-Claude Trichet, the ECB president, for independence of thought and mind, but precisely what is his game? - 3rd April 2009 G20 is leaving main cause of the crisis largely unaddressed - Outlook: Protest is not what it used to be, to judge by yesterday's underwhelming demonstrations in London - 2nd April 2009 Has the tide turned for M&S? Dividend decision will tell it all - Outlook: Once the City's pin-up boy, Sir Stuart Rose, chairman and chief executive of Marks & Spencer, has had his fair share of brickbats since the downturn on the high street first started to bite a year and a half ago - 1st April 2009 Ronson won't call the turn quite yet - Outlook: To London's Dorchester Hotel, where Gerald Ronson was yesterday hosting his annual City lunch - 1st April 2009 Confusion over deposit insurance - Outlook: Yesterday's proposal from the Financial Services Authority to guarantee sums of up to £500,000 under the deposit compensation scheme so as to cover life- changing events such as the sale of a house looks sensible enough, but it is for the time being also completely irrelevant - 1st April 2009 Keeping American dream on the road - Outlook: President Barack Obama gave a number of reasons for wanting to save the core of the American car industry yesterday after rejecting the survival plans submitted by management. Unfortunately, very few of these reasons were commercial - 31st March 2009 Pathetic bleatings of flawed Dunfermline - Outlook: Have you ever heard anything quite so preposterous as the chairman of the Dunfermline Building Society's fulminations against the Treasury for failing to bail him out with wads of taxpayers' money? - 31st March 2009 More banks is what we chiefly need - Outlook: Dear old Alan Greenspan. Ever since the banking crisis first broke, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve has been furiously scribbling away in an attempt to defend his legacy from the growing weight of lacerating commentary which blames Greenspan himself for allowing financial markets to run amok and the boom to get out of control - 28th March 2009 FSA finds that Barclays is telling the truth - Outlook: Right from the start of the banking crisis, Barclays has attempted to argue that it should be viewed differently from other banks, that it had managed its risks more effectively than rivals during the long boom, and that there was therefore no need for the UK Government support that the others had had to avail themselves of - 28th March 2009 Despite Brown's best efforts, G20 can only disappoint - Outlook: Hopes of winning agreement at next week's summit of the G20 for a co-ordinated fiscal stimulus have turned to dust before the meeting could even begin - 27th March 2009 Canary Wharf owner teeters on the brink - Outlook: Those with long memories will recall that Canary Wharf, the London Docklands development which is home to some of the City's largest investment banks, went spectacularly bust in the last - recession. With the economy once more contracting fast, and the financial services industry contracting even faster, is it about to go under for a second time? - 27th March 2009 Inflationary nemesis awaits gilts investment - Outlook - 27th March 2009 Gilt auction failure highlights challenge of the public finances - Outlook: Last week, I expressed the view that the recession should prove just about affordable for the UK assuming nothing further by way of fiscal stimulus. Now I'm not so sure. With the failure of yesterday's long-dated gilt auction – the first such failure in seven years – we may be seeing the beginnings of a buyers' strike that will make the fiscal deficit increasingly difficult to fund - 26th March 2009 Legal & General halves dividend for investors - Outlook: Who would be a non-executive director of a life insurance company right now? Banks look almost transparent by comparison, while even if the chief executive isn't pulling the wool over your eyes, figuring out whether the company is solvent or not is like trying to get your head around the theory of relativity - 26th March 2009 Governor tells Brown he cannot afford to spend any more - Outlook: Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, has broken one of the big unwritten taboos in publicly warning the Government off any further fiscal stimulus - 25th March 2009 The inflationary parrot is not yet deceased - Outlook: To believe the headlines, you would think we were already in an age of deflation, yet the latest numbers have bizarrely forced the Governor of the Bank of England again to write to the Chancellor explaining why inflation is still so much above target - 25th March 2009 Can the Geithner bounce be maintained? - Outlook: Will Tim Geithner's $1 trillion public-private partnership plan for buying up the banking industry's toxic assets mark the bottom of the bear market, as the massive Wall Street rally on Monday seemed to suggest? - 25th March 2009 Believe it if you will as Geithner's $1trn elephant takes flight - Outlook: For some banks there remains a certain inevitability about at least a temporary period of state ownership - 24th March 2009 Daily Mail sees signs of stabilisation - Outlook: More than half of Daily Mail's profits now come from business-to-business activities, which for the time being are proving relatively resilient - 24th March 2009 G20 must be careful not to make cure worse than disease - Outlook: Few events are guaranteed to produce quite so much hot air as international summits of global political leaders. Common ground is so difficult to find that rarely do their communiqués add up to anything more than a string of meaningless platitudes - 21st March 2009 Now it's public debt we must worry about - Outlook: The public finances are continuing to deteriorate at an alarming rate, with growing unemployment, falling corporate tax receipts but still-rising Government spending, further enhanced by repeated bank bailouts - 20th March 2009 Ferrovial's BAA nightmare - Outlook: Ferrovial, the Spanish construction company, cannot claim it wasn't warned. Midway through its top-of-the-market bid for BAA, the Office of Fair Trading announced that it was conducting a competition inquiry into ownership of Britain's airports which could result in the company's eventual break-up - 20th March 2009 Tucker exits Pru at top of his game - Outlook: Most chief executives outstay their welcome. Mark Tucker, chief executive of Prudential, seems to be doing the reverse - 20th March 2009 MPC hawk out, Brown crony in - Outlook: No one will ever admit it publicly, but the Government top brass has not been impressed by the Bank of England's handling of the economic crisis - 20th March 2009 Out goes light touch, in comes the iron fist - Outlook: As you would expect from McKinsey man, Lord Turner has done a masterful job in steering his way through the conflicting demands of the politicians for root-and-branch changes in the way banks are regulated and the need to preserve at least some elements of the free-market system - 19th March 2009 Unemployment surges higher' - Outlook - 19th March 2009 Here's one approach to miscreant banks – just break them up - Outlook: Is it time to bring back Glass-Steagall, the legislation introduced in the US in the 1930s to enforce a rigid separation between ordinary commercial banking and the fee-driven inventiveness of investment banking - 18th March 2009 Bank Governor's reverse ferret may be wrong - Outlook: Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, is like the sinner who repents. Having been far too cautious in the early stages of the credit crunch when he was more concerned with the principles of moral hazard than saving the banking system, he now implicitly criticises our European neighbours for an insufficiently robust macro-economic response to the crisis - 18th March 2009 Is the Bank shooting at the wrong target in aiming at gilts? - Outlook: Chocks away. The Bank of England's latest attempt to get us out of the present mess – quantitative easing – manoeuvred awkwardly on to the runway yesterday - 12th March 2009 America moves in on short sellers - Outlook - 12th March 2009 Depression and the protectionist threat - Outlook: Another grim set of manufacturing figures has raised the question afresh of whether Britain should be following its European neighbours with root and branch aid and support for struggling manufacturers - 11th March 2009 Remember the knights who were after HBOS? - Outlook: One of the joys of financial crises is that they are great levellers. They make fools of even the most arrogant and pompous of financiers. So take heart from the two Scottish bankers who thought the Lloyds TSB takeover such a bad deal for Scotland that they boldly announced they were drumming up financial support for a counter - 11th March 2009 Danger in mergers. Just ask Lloyds TSB - Outlook: Has any takeover or merger ever produced long-term value for investors and other stakeholders? - 7th March 2009 Wolseley makes case for rights issue queue - Outlook: Bring back the "rights issue queue". The cry has gone up anew following the spectacle of Wolseley's £1bn share issue. The present glut of distress rights issues has forced the UK-based building supplies company into the most extraordinary contortions to secure desperately needed new equity funding - 7th March 2009 Everything else has been tried. Now King goes nuclear - Outlook: Lights, camera, action. Yesterday's decision to sanction £150bn of "quantitative easing" by the Bank of England has been a long time in the making, but the moment is no less historic for it - 6th March 2009 Insurers get the banking treatment - Outlook: Has the stock market got it completely wrong about Aviva and other insurers, or are chief executives being too optimistic about their ability to ride out the storm in asset prices and the economy? - 6th March 2009 ITV is still struggling to make the grade in brave new world - Outlook: Poor old Michael Grade. Two years ago, the media veteran quit the licence fee-insulated environment of the BBC to take on the challenge of turning around ITV, and he actually produced a half-way decent plan for doing so - 5th March 2009 Barclays mulls £50bn of asset protection - Outlook - 5th March 2009 Wheeler gets the bullet at Brixton - Outlook: Personally, I rather liked Tim Wheeler, the now ex-chief executive of Brixton Estates, but he was not well liked in the City - 4th March 2009 The dividend gusher is over - Outlook: One of the reasons why stock markets are still crashing is the outlook for dividends, which has turned truly dire. Over time, most of the return on equities comes from dividends, so the virtual cessation of these payments is as much if not more of a concern to long-term equity investors as the present loss of value - 4th March 2009 A standard-bearer for Britain’s banks. Pity they didn’t follow it - Outlook: Is Standard Chartered the only solvent bank left in Britain? - 4th March 2009 HSBC's blockbuster rights further rattles skittish investors - Outlook: The HSBC rights issue was only part of a heady cocktail of negatives from across the globe - 3rd March 2009 Time to stop talking down banking assets - Outlook - 28th February 2009 A right royal shocker from Lloyds chiefs - Outlook: So where's the Lloyds Banking Group asset protection deal? The markets were all lined up to expect an announcement similar in size and detail to what Royal Bank of Scotland had outlined the day before, and then nothing - 28th February 2009 Let's have the truth on Fred's pension award - Outlook - 28th February RBS shareholders pay a heavy price for asset protection - Outlook: If it looks like a nationalised bank, behaves like a nationalised bank and is ordered around by ministers as if it is a nationalised bank, why not just nationalise and be done with it? - 27th February 2009 Myners cited in Goodwin row - Outlook: The row over Sir Fred Goodwin's pension is proving as much an embarrassment for the Government as it is for Sir Fred - 27th February 2009 Clamour grows for more regulation - Outlook: Look out. Here comes Jacques de Larosiere, a former managing director of the IMF, to add the EU's penny's worth to the already raging debate on how to reform financial regulation - 26th February 2009 Japan's land of the setting sun - Outlook: The sun has been setting on the Japanese economy for the best part of 20 years, but over the last few months, the country has been plunged into deepest darkness - 26th February 2009 Bank rescues: Too complicated by half? - Outlook: Will the "asset protection scheme" due to be outlined by the Treasury and two of the big high street banks over the next few days work? - 26th February 2009 Bank rescues: Too complicated by half? - Outlook: Will the "asset protection scheme" due to be outlined by the Treasury and two of the big high street banks over the next few days work? - 25th February 2009 There goes another Murdoch lieutenant - Outlook: Mr Chernin is only the latest in a long line of executives to realise that unless your last name is Murdoch, you are never going to get to be top dog - 25th February 2009 (See also: Peter Chernin and the Empire of the rising son) Rio must stress Eastern promise - Outlook: Rio Tinto stands accused of being adventurous to the point of recklessness in paying top dollar for Alcan a year and a half ago - 25th February 2009 Ninety per cent mortgages courtesy of the taxpayer - Outlook: The debt overhang of the boom has to be removed before a proper recovery can begin - 24th February 2009 In half-hearted defence of hedgies - Outlook: Hedgies are speculators – no more, no less – and a lot of them aren’t even particularly clever - 24th February 2009 We don’t need this many car-makers. Get used to it - Outlook: If there was no future for Saab under General Motors’ ownership, there certainly won’t be as an independent entity - 21st February 2009 Anglo American tells it as it is - Outlook: The UK stock market was no doubt riding for a fall yesterday whatever the news flow, but Cynthia Carroll, chief executive of the mining giant Anglo American, certainly didn’t help by axing the dividend and issuing an almost apocalyptic outlook statement - 21st February 2009 If it quacks like a duck... - Outlook: If someone looks, behaves and quacks like a crook, then he generally is one. Few come as well advertised as the Texan financier Allen Stanford - 21st February 2009 Watch out for bond yields as public debt spirals out of control - Outlook: So maybe bumper City bonuses weren't such a bad idea after all. City bonuses, together with the soaraway profits that their sponsoring organisations once used to make, have been helping sustain the public finances for years - 20th February 2009 Commercial property takes a terrible bath - Outlook - 20th February 2009 Bank resorts to extreme solutions. Possibly lethal too - Outlook: Quantitative easing (QE) here we come. QE is the fancy term for increasing the money supply, or turning on the presses and printing money. Nothing exactly like it has been tried before on these shores, but something similar has, and on virtually all occasions it has proved disastrous - 19th February 2009 Thanks Dave. That’s just what investors needed - Outlook: To believe the way they are reported in published company accounts, there is no problem with pension fund deficits right now. Some of them are obviously whoppers, but across the piste, defined benefit pension schemes look to be marginally in surplus. Unfortunately, this is just a trick of the accounting light - 19th February 2009 In attacking deflation are we not just stoking inflation? - Outlook: To believe the noise, we are already in a 1930s-style deflation. Yet inflation figures announced yesterday show that we are not there quite yet - 18th February 2009 L&G attempts to reassure on bonds - Outlook" - 18th February 2009 Japanese horror show reveals depths of the global slump - Outlook: The data just keeps on getting worse and worse. The 3.3 per cent reduction in GDP reported yesterday by Japan for the final quarter of last year is by far the largest economic contraction for any of the big developed nations announced so far - 17th February 2009 Lloyds only has itself to blame for HBOS misery - Outlook: Is the mess Lloyds TSB has got itself into by acquiring HBOS down to the Prime Minister? - 17th February 2009 HBOS losses are in danger of swamping Lloyds - Outlook: Eric Daniels and his chairman at Lloyds Banking Group, Sir Victor Blank, must be ruing the day they agreed to acquire the troubled Halifax Bank of Scotland - 14th February 2009 Hedge funds dished on Rocky judgment - Outlook: There is rarely any point in suing the Government, particularly when it concerns something which has been done by Act of Parliament and therefore already has the full backing of the democratic process. In these circumstances, the judiciary will nearly always back the body politic - 14th February 2009 Right way forward for Rio, or another Chinese takeaway? - Outlook: In attempting to address its short-term financing needs, Rio Tinto seems to be selling its soul - 13th February 2009 Insurers: all stressed out - Outlook: The Financial Services Authority has given Britain's insurers a terrible fright by demanding they stress-test their capital reserves against a further catastrophic decline in equity values, another significant widening in spreads, and a dramatic rise in bond defaults - 13th February 2009 Brown wants FSA to regulate bankers' pay - Outlook - 13th February 2009 US stability plan risks same mistakes as predecessors - Outlook: Well done, I suppose, but where's the detail, and is it enough? - 11th February 2009 Bankers make easy scapegoats, but... - Outlook: Only MPs on the Commons Treasury Committee could make the quartet of bankers who appeared before them yesterday look like models of reasonable, intelligent and considered thinking - 11th February 2009 What makes for a Depression? - Outlook - 11th February 2009 Bankers' excesses require retribution, not reviews of pay - Outlook: Banking, both at retail and wholesale level, is dominated by a cosy cartel of self-interested skimmers - 10th February 2009 Can Mandy fix it as UK manufacturers stare into the abyss? - Outlook: Much of my reporting and commentary over the past 15 years has been on finance, banking, the housing market and the creative industries. In the post-industrial society we seemed to have moved into, this was where the action was. With these industries in the doldrums, it is to manufacturing, until a year ago a backwater of the British economy, that everyone looks for salvation - 7th February 2009 This rate cut may not do it, but next comes a leap of faith - Outlook: Yesterday's further half- point cut in interest rates from the Bank of England is welcome enough, but whether it will make much difference is open to question. It is the availability of credit, not its cost, which is the real cause forconcern right now - 6th February 2009 Bankers' pay will be curbed one way or another - Outlook: The politicians have to be seen to be doing something to assuage public anger over bankers' pay, and it is indeed outrageous that organisations which would be insolvent but for the support of taxpayers are continuing to pay some employees multimillion-pound bonuses Baugur was always an accident waiting to happen - Outlook: In its own way, Baugur is no less of a proxy for the credit crisis than Northern Rock - 5th February 2009 Russia gets the downgrade - Outlook: Why pick on Russia? Fitch yesterday became the latest rating agency to downgrade Russia's sovereign debt to just above junk status - 5th February 2009 A manifesto to save the free market - The need for action: The Independent's Business and City Editor sets out a 10-point plan to defeat the credit crunch and preserve our economic system for future generations in the face of this global meltdown - 5th February 2009 Unpopular Tarp gets Obama treatment - Outlook: Like everything else devised by the Bush administration, the $700bn Troubled Asset Relief Programme (Tarp) for bailing out the US banking system is being rethought - 3rd February 2009 Do as we say, not as we do when it comes to protectionism - Outlook: So much in public policy right now is virgin territory that it is reasonable to forgive the politicians the odd mixed message. Even so, it is impossible to ignore thecontradictions at the heart of the Government's lecturing on thedangers of protectionism - 31st January 2009 It's good to talk - 'Outlook: Stephen Green's idea of a "B20" to encourage a dialogue between global business and policymakers is a good one - 31st January 2009 A cell still beckons - Outlook: Why aren't bankers going to jail? – it is being asked by some here in Davos - 31st January 2009 Can capitalism ever adopt a conscience? Perhaps it will have to - Outlook: Can capitalism ever be socially responsible, or is that simply not part of its DNA? - 30th January 2009 The buck doesn't just stop with the US - Outlook: In essence what was happening was that the Chinese were lending the Americans the money to buy Chinese imports and inflated real estate - 30th January 2009 In downbeat Davos, the happy capitalist is hard to find - Outlook: This year, business leaders and bankers are left forlornly wondering what more governments can do to bail them out - 29th January 2009 Roach enjoys his day in the sun - Outlook: He claims to take no pleasure in eventually being proved right, but Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and a regular fixture of these mountain-top conferences, is living in clover - 29th January 2009 Where have all the bankers gone? - One regular Davos constituency conspicuous by its absence this year is the American investment banking community - 28th January 2009 Government must act to revive bank shares - Outlook: Another day, another hammering for bank shares. Nationalisation is certainly a distinct possibility, which is one of the reasons share prices keep falling, making it an almost self-fulfilling prophecy - 24th January 2009 Exchange rates reignite fears of protectionism - Outlook: The more the pound depreciates against the euro, the stronger the temptation becomes for the eurozone to put up protective barriers against sterling imports - 24th January 2009 Merrill's Thain: from hero to zero in just four short months - Outlook: Have they no shame? The one-time golden boy of Goldman Sachs, John Thain, may be a dab hand at personal enrichment, but in other respects he seems to be stupid beyond belief - 23rd January 2009 Maybe the Arabs should bid for Barclays outright - Outlook - 23rd January 2009 It's grim but is the UK really "finished"? - Outlook: We are still heading into the economic storm with no way of knowing quite how vicious it will become or when we can hope to be pulling out the other side - 22nd January 2009 Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water - Outlook: Progress requires that adequate checks, balances and restrictions are introduced to make banking safe again - 22nd January 2009 UK not drowning, only waving - Outlook: Jim Rogers, former partner of George Soros and something of an investment guru in his own right, has again been sounding off about sterling and the UK economy, which he believes essentially finished. Sell sterling, he says - 21st January 2009 UK banks head towards outright nationalisation - Outlook - 21st January 2009 Royal Bank likely to end up nationalised - Outlook: New Labour is understandably still terrified of revisiting Britain's bankrupt history of nationalisation - 20th January 2009 Final denouement approaches as crisis enters new phase - Outlook: Over the last week, the banking crisis has taken a new, and frightening, lurch downwards. No sooner have the authorities managed to quell one fire than another one breaks out - 17th January 2009 The politicians won't touch it, but the euro now looks attractive - Outlook: the British economy is today more converged with the Continent than at any stage since the euro was launched, while the credit crunch has thrown up some powerful new arguments in favour of being part of a larger currency block - 16th January 2009 Third runway won't be built. Get used to it - Outlook: politics is about the art of the possible and the only person who seems not to have realised this is Gordon Brown - 16th January 2009 Davies joins the Government - Outlook: Few had even heard of Mervyn Davies before he became chief executive of Standard Chartered in 2001 - 15th January 2009 Unfinished business at Rio for Skinner - Outlook: In many respects, Mr Skinner was an excellent chairman of Rio, but he made one fundamental mistake - 15th January 2009 Baroness Vadera puts foot in mouth - Outlook: The Government has been accused of copying proposed Tory remedies on the credit crunch. Now it seems intent on copying their howlers too - 15th January 2009 (see: Anger as minister gives upbeat view on economy, The Independent) HSBC and the search for capital - Outlook - 15th January 2009 Sterling's fall hasn't helped trade deficit - Outlook: To the contrary, the latest figures show a further widening in the trade deficit - 14th January 2009 Indian IT takes a further knock - Outlook: Recent events have dealt the Indian IT services sector, the subcontinent's biggest industrial success story of recent years, a triple whammy - 14th January 2009 Euroland's widening credit spreads - Outlook: Portugal yesterday became the latest eurozone country to have its sovereign debt put on negative watch by Standard & Poor's - 14th January 2009 Brown promises not on his watch as jobs disaster mushrooms - Outlook: After another grim day of job losses around the country, does yesterday's package of measures to get the unemployed back on to the shop floor help to fulfil that promise? Scarcely - 13th January 2009 Wrong-headed thinking on future of Channel 4 - Outlook: Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, thinks that the solution to Channel 4's problems as the advertising market contracts is that it should merge with channel Five - 13th January 2009 Manufacturing is getting harder hit even than banking - Outlook: judging by new figures published yesterday, what remains of Britain's once mighty manufacturing base is being hit even harder by the downturn than the bankers who started it all - 10th January 2009 Tories lack credibility on the economy - Outlook: I'm not a political columnist, but that's not going to stop me commenting on the abject failure of the Tories to make political capital out of Britain's economic woes - 10th January 2009 Bank is fast running out of road on rates - Outlook: So in the end, it was "just" the half point, rather than the full point some had been calling for. Up until four months ago, a half-point cut in interest rates would have been regarded as a near panic measure - 9th January 2009 Record issuance is bad news for bonds - Outlook: A harbinger of things to come, or just an anomaly? To everyone's astonishment, the German government yesterday failed to raise the full €6bn it was looking for from an auction of 10-year bonds - 8th January2009 Darling wants say on 'quantitative easing' - Outlook: Back in Blighty, what to my mind seems a somewhat manufactured row is developing between the Treasury and the Bank of England over who would be responsible for determining the scale and manner of "quantitative easing" should the continued deterioration in the economy require it. This is the technical term used to describe the printing of money in an attempt to tackle a deflationary debt spiral - 8th January 2009 Investors left to sweat over fate of M&S dividend - Outlook - 8th January 2009 Downturn will sort the retailing wheat from the chaff - Outlook: And they are off. The start of the Christmas trading update season has brought relatively good news from the high street, or at least news that was not nearly as bad as some had been forecasting - 7th January 2009 How to get banks lending once more - Outlook: To act as a substitute for the banks in credit provision might undermine the Government's perceived creditworthiness - 6th January 2009 Surplus nations have obligations too - Outlook: If trade is to work to everyone's advantage, surplus nations must do more to stimulate demand - 3rd January 2009 A short-selling ban that should be extended - Outlook: The likes of Mr Paulson didn't so much as correctly predict the future as help to create it - 3rd January 2009 Forget mortgage borrowers, what about savers? - Outlook: Even if bank rate falls to zero, the mortgage holder would still have to pay at least 1.5 per cent - 3rd January 2009 Whither bombed-out equity markets? - Outlook:equities are not yet an entirely dead parrot. To the contrary, with debt in full retreat, equity becomes a relatively scarce and therefore valuable form of capital that can expect to command a premium to match - 1st January 2009 Money may be root of evil, but regrettably we are stuck with it - Outlook: Boom and bust is as much a part of capitalism as night and day - 30th December 2008 Snow and ice lies round about, deep and crisp and even - Outlook: If you think the last three months were bad, just wait for the next three. Everyone I speak to in business and banking anticipates an appalling start to next year - 18th December 2008 HSBC scotches rights issue rumours - Outlook: Does HSBC need to have a rights issue or find alternative ways of raising new capital? - 18th December 2008 Few winners in a year of losers - Oulook - 18th December 2008 Desperation Fed enters zero interest rate territory - Outlook: So that's it, then. With one great blast, the US Federal Reserve has fired off all that remains in the monetary cannon, reducing the Fed Funds rate to an unprecedented 0 to 0.25 per cent Way forward for the Royal Mail - Outlook: If nationalisation is meant to be good for the banks, why is privatisation thought good for Royal Mail? - 17th December 2008 Investors should have looked at Madoff's golf scores - Outlook: Ms Horlick and her co-investors were victims, but only of their own stupidity, greed and carelessness - 16th December 2008 (Summary of Bernard Madoff news articles here) After the car-makers, what next for state rescue? Disneyland? - Outlook: whatever its motives, the Senate was right to have turned down the proposed $14bn rescue package, and the White House is wrong to be dipping its hand into the Troubled Asset Relief Programme (Tarp) to provide alternative funding - 13th December 2008 Horlick damaged as Madoff makes off with the loot - Outlook - 13th December 2008 (see: 'Superwoman' stung by hedge fund guru's '$50bn trading scam', The Independent, 13th December 2008) Crass Keynesianism should be replaced with pure Keynes - Outlook: I'm thinking of vacating my position as a daily columnist in favour of Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister who this week criticised Gordon Brown for "crass Keynesianism" - 12th December 2008 (see: Why spendthrift Brown is scaring the Germans, The Independent, 12th December 2008 City is humbled, but remains unbowed - Outlook: The City has survived wars, pestilence, invasion and countless financial implosions, but can it survive what is said to be the worst banking crisis since the First World War, possibly the worst ever? - 11th December 2008 It doesn't feel like Christmas - Outlook: To the London Stock Exchange's Christmas lunch, where the concentration of banking chairmen is higher than the opening evening of the Chelsea Flower Show. The mood is appropriately sombre and reflective, after what must rate as the most tumultuous year in financial markets any of the assembled has ever experienced - 11th December 2008 Ministers all over the shop on banks - Outlook: Current policy objectives are conflicting and incoherent - 10th December 2008 Carphone's Ross condemned as either knave or fool - Mr Ross is entitled to do with his shares what he wants, but when he pledges them to others, the markets are also entitled to know about it - 9th December 2008 (see: Phone tycoon quits over shares), The Independent, 9th December 2008 State aid for lame-duck car makers - Outlook: Governments are hurling money at their car makers with the same abandon that until recently was reserved only for banks Middle incomes hit worst by tax squeeze - Outlook - 6th December 2008 Scaremongering and the financial press - Outlook - 6th December 2008 Now the credit crunch hits Formula One - Outlook - 6th December 2008 When interest rates reach zero, what does the Bank do then? - Outlook - 5th December 2008 Sterling was far too high. Now it may be going the other way - Outlook - 4th December 2008 Mortgage plan may be smarter than it looks - Outlook - 4th December 2008 British Airways adds Qantas to list of marriage partners - Outlook - 3rd December 2008 Housing market adjustment cannot so easily be halted - Outlook: The Royal Bank of Scotland hope that people might look more kindly on banks now that they are planning to give six months breathing space to householders who fall behind with their mortgage payments. Big deal - 2nd December 2008 Now we own the banks, what should we do with them? - Outlook - 29th November 2008 Retailers face up to a slimline future - Outlook: First housebuilding, now retailers. After banking, these are the industries in the front line of the deepening economic and financial crisis, though there are plenty of others fast following up the rear - 28th November 2008 Government is guilty of double-talk over bank lending - Outlook: Even if the Government could afford to take the liabilities of a Royal Bank of Scotland or Lloyds TSB on to its books, which it can't, it's not clear it would lead to an immediate resumption in lending - 27th November 2008 BHP's Rio tilt proves costly waste of time - Outlook - 26th November 2008 Bankers adopt can't lend, won't lend approach - Outlook - 26th November 2008 This is more politics than economics – with a sting in the tail - Outlook - 25th November 2008 Bretton Woods II this is not, but at least it is a start - Outlook - 14th November 2008 Don't count on a rapid bounce back - Outlook - 13th November 2008 BBC's regional ambitions must be halted - Outlook - 13th November 2008 Sterling crisis threatens Brown's reflationary plans - Outlook - 12th November 2008 It's tough reflating the economy when there's no money - Outlook - 11th November 2008 An independent HBOS? Hope springs eternal - Outlook - 11th November 2008 Bank acts boldly to get back ahead of the curve on rates - Outlook - 7th November 2008 Downturn bites hard at Marks & Spencer - 5th November 2008 Time for a public inquiry on the banking crisis - Lessons cannot be learned and acted upon unless the facts are properly understood - 4th November 2008 Britain starts to pay the price for fifteen years of boom - Outlook - 25th October 2008 Greenspan admits to 'flaw' in his free market thinking - 24th October 2008 Oligarchs, Mandelson and Osborne - 22nd October 2008 Governments must be bolder to prevent economic calamity - Outlook - 17th October 2008 China syndrome fuels latest bout of panic in markets - Outlook - 16th October 2008 Outlook: Problems aplenty emerge in the great bank bailout - Outlook - 15th October 2008 Banks made to pay a heavy price for taxpayers' largesse - Outlook - 14th October 2008 The goalposts have shifted dramatically - Banking the world over is about to become publicly controlled - 13th October 2008 More action needed as market crash threatens meltdown - Outlook - 11th October 2008 Politicians play the blame game, but everyone is culpable - Outlook - 10th October 2008 It may not work, but at last policymakers are on the right track - Outlook - 9th October 2008 A comprehensive bailout for banks, but will it work? - Outlook - 8th October 2008 Banks set to agree £50bn package - how a dramatic meeting in Downing Street is likely to lead to £50bn recapitalisation package - and why it may not be enough - 7th October 2008 Are governments getting it right on bank bailouts? - Outlook - 2nd October 2008 UK Government may need to guarantee deposits - Outlook - 1st October 2008 The financial storm continues to build - Outlook - 30th September 2008 How many more will have to be saved? - Such is now the scale of the global banking crisis that news that once would have been counted as sensational – the nationalisation of Bradford & Bingley – now barely passes the "so what" test - 29th September 2008 In the blame game, it's regulators who are most at fault - Outlook - 27th September 2008 WaMu may offer template for B&B solution - 27th September 2008 Paulson's $700bn bailout hangs in the balance. But even if it passes, will it save the system from meltdown? - Outlook - 26th September 2008 Short sellers are just the start of regulatory purge - Outlook - 20th September 2008 Lloyds-Halifax shows policymakers are starting to get it right over crisis - Outlook - 19th September 2008 Wall Street and the City get their comeuppance - Outlook - 16th September 2008 Independent.co / Jeremy Warner (archive)

News & updates: Jeremy Warner leaves Independent to join Telegraph - Jeremy Warner has left The Independent after 23 years to become assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph - Press Gazette, 31st March 2009 Jeremy Warner of The Independent: "Jeremy Warner, the business editor of The Independent, has always been one of Sir Anthony O'Reilly's favourite journalists, which makes his decision this week to leave the newspaper to write columns for the The Daily Telegraph all the more significant. Warner was one of the few journalists still working at the title, now owned by Sir Anthony's Independent News & Media, since it was launched. His departure shows little confidence when Sir Anthony's grip is weak" - from The Times, 3rd April 2009

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