By: Christian May

Editor-in-Chief Christian May is the Editor-in-Chief of City AM. He served in the role from 2015 to 2020 and returned in 2024. He writes the daily Editor's Letter for print and online and releases The Week in Business roundup video each Thursday. He is particularly interested in the health of London's capital markets, economic policy, politics, regulation and business activity in the City of London. He regularly appears in the broadcast media and presents a daily Business News slot on LBC at 0730, Monday to Friday. Find Christian on X and LinkedIn.

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Editor’s Notes: Our world is getting better all the time; a G&T at 28,000ft; knocking down the door to the City; and Andrew Adonis is triggered by City A.M.

August 10, 2018

Ignore the misery merchants, the world is getting better all the time When voters are asked to estimate the size of the immigrant population, the rate of teenage pregnancy or the level of unemployment, they routinely overshoot. This mindset is prevalent among voters right across the world according to Bobby Duffy, author of a new [...]
Editor’s Notes: The real threat to our democracy is the call for a second referendum, making new homes more popular and communism vs liberty

August 3, 2018

There's a lot of talk around about “our democracy being under threat.” This alarmist claim is thrown around by people who are still fighting the Brexit referendum – many of whom are convinced that Leave only prevailed thanks to Russian disinformation, nefarious online campaigns and dodgy money. Guardian columnists, keyboard warriors and a handful of [...]
Taxes are too high and too complicated – it’s time for urgent reform

July 9, 2018

A week ago, this newspaper bemoaned the government's drift towards tax rises – and the lack of any proper low-tax Tories coming to the fore. Without a doubt, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour has shifted the Overton Window (the range of policies deemed acceptable by politicians) and the debate now largely concerns which taxes to raise and [...]
Editor’s Notes: The City is right to warn the EU against its own Brexit complacency, UBS’s forecasting woes and Xavier Rolet’s agricultural insight

June 29, 2018

The heat is rising in the City, and not just because of the recent heatwave. On Wednesday, the normally mild-mannered chief of TheCityUK, the finance industry’s main lobby group, unleashed his frustration at EU regulators over their failure to meet the UK halfway on securing a legal basis for the continuation of cross-border contracts post-Brexit. [...]
Theresa May should let Boris be Boris from the backbenches

June 26, 2018

Is Boris Johnson such a good foreign secretary that the rules of cabinet collective responsibility simply need not apply to him? Is he such a skilled diplomat that the rules must bend to excuse him from a vote on the vital issue of our country's future aviation strategy? Is this country so in need of [...]
Editor’s Notes: Without the UK, the EU can resume its march to ever closer union, Nex’s Michael Spencer backs British bubbly and Lady Wilson remembered

June 15, 2018

Earlier this week I chaired a discussion at TheCityUK’s annual conference, where several people, including the lobby group’s chairman, John McFarlane, stressed the point that “there’s life beyond Brexit”. It can’t be said often enough, given how much of our national attention and energy has been sucked into the black hole of Brexit: the uncertainty, [...]
BT’s investors lost faith in Gavin Patterson

June 11, 2018

When BT announced last month that it would cut 13,000 jobs, many wondered if it would in fact end up as 13,001. Investor patience had been wearing thin, and chief executive Gavin Patterson had been standing on thin ice for a while. From a peak of nearly 500p in November 2015, BT's share price has [...]
Italy’s populists will take advantage of this chaos for all it is worth

May 29, 2018

As a spectator sport, Italian politics rarely disappoints. The spectacle of the radical, anti-establishment 5 Star Movement stitching together a plan for government with the far-right League has been gripping and alarming in equal measure. How would sweeping tax cuts sit alongside a massive expansion of welfare? How would markets react to a debt-laden economy [...]
Editor’s Notes: Time to wake up to your own online data dump

March 23, 2018

Having spent the past decade pouring my every opinion and interest on toFacebook, I find myself outraged to discover that the data generated by my self-obsessed oversharing has been used to try and sell me things. Worse, political campaigns have been using my deep data footprint to try and target me with campaign messages. This [...]
‘Trump could be the best president since Reagan’: US ambassador Woody Johnson on trade deals, tariffs, Brexit and London’s ‘surprisingly good’ restaurants

March 13, 2018

Six months into his term as Donald Trump’s ambassador to the UK, and newly installed south of the river in a fortress-like embassy, Woody Johnson is enjoying himself. “I’m loving it,” he tells me, in his first interview with a business newspaper since arriving in London last August. At a reception for journalists in the [...]

UK fintech Zempler Bank gets snapped up for less than half its previous valuation

Why KKR-Arctos is not just about private equity getting bigger

The unlikely City florist that once served the royals

By: Christian May

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