RAPID RESPONSES September 28, 2011 Miliband DebatEd Thanks to Luke Johnson for voicing what everyone is thinking in @cityamforum this morning! Christopher Lomas Conference is about appealing to your base. To suggest Labour will clobber private business is disinformation. Miliband may be useless, but the lurch to the Left is not likely, otherwise Labour can forget power for a generation [...]
EC proposals to reform the audit market are seriously flawed, says PWC chairman September 27, 2011 LEAKED European Commission proposals for regulatory changes to the audit market hit the front page yesterday. They represent a significant market intervention and while they have not changed substantially from a Green Paper published last year, if implemented they would risk undermining quality and confidence in the audit market. Of course, this is an important [...]
Miliband shows why Labour are not fit for office September 27, 2011 ED MILIBAND has just demonstrated why he is unfit to lead this country. Yesterday, he delivered a speech which showed he doesn’t really understand business, and probably doesn’t even believe in capitalism. It was an oration full of vague phrases and void of specifics, but the sentiment was clear. He is suspicious of big business, [...]
Ministerial favouritism isn’t business-friendly September 27, 2011 VINCE Cable’s Department for Business announced a plan last week to give the UK’s 50 largest firms ministerial “business buddies”. For example, Nissan will make friends with enterprise minister Mark Prisk, Vodafone will get chummy with culture secretary Jeremy Hunt and British Gas will have Cable himself as a ministerial pal. What will government ministers [...]
RAPID RESPONSES September 27, 2011 Kudrin can return Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin being sacked by President Dimitry Medvedev is not nearly as humiliating as President Medvedev being sacked by his Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin. The Kudrin dismissal is a short-term disaster for Russia. That the country did not collapse during the global financial crisis was almost entirely due to [...]
The euro rollercoaster isn’t over: The new plan to save it is a complete non-starter September 26, 2011 THERE was quite a bit of excitement in the media and financial markets over the weekend. The hot news was that Eurozone leaders, on the sidelines of the G20 summit, forged a new grand scheme to save the embattled euro. The plan, we were told by some, would be announced “within days”. Alas, details are [...]
Red Ed needs the speech of his life to survive today September 26, 2011 IT IS RARE that a party leader of just twelve months standing is faced with making a speech that is considered to be make-or-break for his future prospects. But that is exactly the position facing Ed Miliband as he delivers his Labour conference speech in Liverpool today. A strong summer performance on phone hacking cannot [...]
Creating the right jobs is harder than it looks September 26, 2011 BARACK Obama realises that the key to keeping his own job is to start creating them for other people. The US unemployment figures are high (above 9 per cent), sustained (the recession officially ended almost two years ago), and deepening (half of the unemployed have been out of work for more than 6 months). His [...]
RAPID RESPONSES September 26, 2011 Rating the OBR Dagong Global Credit cut the UK’s credit rating in May. The cut came with a revision of the UK’s growth forecast to 1.3-1.5 per cent this year, rather than the 1.7 per cent predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility. The IMF just revised its UK growth forecast to 1.1 per cent, [...]
The cuts are a convenient lie for the whole political class: CityAM does the maths September 25, 2011 BY THE TIME you finish this article, the UK’s central government will have spent around a million pounds. It is quite possible that it will have spent even more. Sounds incredible, yes? But last month, and every month this year, that is precisely what happened. For each minute that passed in August, the UK’s central [...]