Rating agencies are still far too soft January 16, 2012 MANY people have been outraged by Standard & Poor’s downgrades of so many countries, including France and Austria – and last night, of the European bailout fund itself, now no longer backed by enough AAA-nations to be deemed safe. But those who are angry are deluding themselves. The only scandal is why it has taken [...]
How US CEOs are being cut down to size by investors January 15, 2012 HERE is a finding you won’t have read elsewhere. The total pay of top CEOs in listed US firms has gone down – yes, gone down – by about 50 per cent in real terms since peaking in 2000-01. This is what Steve Kaplan, professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, reveals [...]
Londoners can’t wait another decade January 12, 2012 IT was good to hear Boris Johnson’s commitment to boosting London’s rail and road infrastructure at his speech to Mansion House last night. High speed rail is a waste of money but there are plenty of smaller, local projects, including in London, that would add far more value and tap more easily into private funds. [...]
Life isn’t just – but self-belief works January 11, 2012 SOMETIMES, willing something to happen actually works. If you are young and want to make lots of money when you grow up, you are actually much more likely to end up richer than those of your peers with a more relaxed attitude to wealth. The first prerequisite to becoming rich is to want to become [...]
Six reasons this rail plan is a mistake January 10, 2012 IF money grew on trees, the government’s London-Birmingham HS2 high-speed rail scheme would be a good thing. Unfortunately, the nation faces fiscal Armageddon; so here are six reasons (there are many more) why the coalition is wrong to back HS2. 1) Like virtually all government infrastructure projects, the costs of this grandiose white elephant will [...]
Time to root out fake facts on boards and pay January 9, 2012 REWARDS for failure are bad; rewards for doing well are good. That is one of this newspaper’s guiding principals; as I argued in this space yesterday, the Prime Minister is right to be giving more powers to shareholders to make sure they exercise closer control over boards. It is wrong and indefensible for CEOs who [...]
Cameron right to back shareholders January 8, 2012 SO David Cameron believes in capitalism after all. His proposal to give shareholders a binding vote on the pay of their CEOs is sound. Companies are owned by shareholders, not directors, government, workers or busybodies; it is shareholders’ job to be involved in key decisions and not become absentee landlords. Rewards for failure in business [...]
Welcome to 2012’s two-speed world January 5, 2012 ON the face of it, it would seem that nothing changed during the holiday season. Take some of the news in today’s paper. Hungary is in ever-deeper crisis, the euro reached another 15-month low yesterday and Eurozone bank shares plunged, led by those of Italy’s UniCredit. Important stuff, certainly, but more of the same. It [...]