BEST OF THE BROKERS January 22, 2012 PETROFAC JP Morgan downgrades the oil services group to neutral with a target price of 1,699p, despite seeing good potential for a margin upside to balance any shortfall in revenue from its order intake and project progress. The broker says the $8bn (£5.14bn) of orders it has estimated as necessary to meet consensus forecasts for [...]
WALL STREET WEEK AHEAD January 22, 2012 STOCKS rising, bulls rampant are motifs you might pick if designing a coat of arms for Wall Street at the moment. But the motto should read: Caveat emptor. Yes, buyer beware. The S&P 500, a broad measure of the market valuation of the biggest US publicly traded companies, is up 20 per cent from its [...]
New technologies that will allow us to live even longer will pay economic dividends January 22, 2012 THERE is little downside to the wonderful reality that human beings are now living longer than ever before. While many assume that society’s economic burden radically increases with greater longevity, the reality is the opposite. Everyone is better off because of longer life expectancies. For example, in 1850, life expectancy in the United States was [...]
Ratings agencies won’t be trusted without a fight January 22, 2012 THE Big Three rating agencies hardly seem to be out of the news with their ability to move markets. Following Standard & Poor’s (S&P) decision to reduce its assessment of the health of France’s sovereign debt by one notch to AA+ from AAA status, top German politicians like Michael Fuchs and others have jumped on [...]
London’s success is the whole country’s gain January 22, 2012 HAVING just returned to this country after leading a senior City delegation to Turkey, I am currently on an equally important business visit – to six of our own major cities across the United Kingdom. At first glance, it may seem to some that promoting the City in my hometown of Bradford – where I [...]
RAPID RESPONSES January 22, 2012 Informal channels Dionysios Demetis makes a good point [Tracking Money Laundering Matters, Wednesday] – very little terrorist funding goes through the conventional banking system. Most of the cross-border financing is via the hawala or informal money transfer system, especially to and from the Indian sub-continent. The UK authorities are well aware of this but do [...]
At least world won’t end in 2012 January 22, 2012 AMONG the many gloomy predictions for the coming year, what really catches the eye is the one that says the world will end on 21 December 2012. This is, debatably, the prognosis of the Mayan calendar of eschatology. If the world were really to end on that date, one suspects it would come as a [...]
A Brit in New York who is truly getting stuck in January 22, 2012 MOST students don’t even consider setting up a business, but at university Will Dean founded an alternative graduation t-shirt company to compete with UK universities’ offerings. He later took near-monopolistic control of the global supply of antique Bollywood posters. But this was small fry compared to his current company: Tough Mudder. After finishing university he [...]
THE BEST LAID PLANS OF SOME ENTREPRENEURS January 22, 2012 JOHN, Jeremy and Joan had a plan. A good plan. A plan to start a business. They were so sure that the business would succeed that each used £100,000 of their own money to fund the start-up costs and take the inevitable losses until they turned the corner into profit. Their hunch was right, and [...]
We should embrace and foster success – not disincentivise it January 22, 2012 IT IS good news that Sir Richard Branson, still the UK’s most famous self-made businessman, will be speaking at this year’s Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) in Liverpool – the first ever to be held in Europe. Taking place from 9 to 16 March, this is the world’s largest gathering of “startup champions”. Branson says: “A [...]
