City Views | How much have you spent on Valentine’s day this year? February 14, 2013 ADAM LEWIS | UBS I have a girlfriend and haven’t spent a penny. I don’t see it as a big thing and only found out when somebody told me today… I found a poem, copied it into an email and sent it to her. I don’t think she’s particularly worried either. PHIL KNIGHT | SEB [...]
City Moves for 15 February 2013 | Who’s switching jobs February 14, 2013 CBRE The property firm has appointed Andrew Peacock as head of central London asset management. He joins after 24 years at Aviva Investors, where he held a number of senior roles, including manager of its central London office portfolio. Towers Watson The professional services company has appointed Liz Rennie as senior consultant in its human [...]
Best of the Brokers February 14, 2013 SPIRIT PUB COMPANY Broker Numis has reiterated its “buy” rating on the pub stock after it said the company’s growth prospects were “undervalued”. Analysts said there were concerns about the firm’s bond amortisation schedule in 2015 but that it should be resolved by refinancing. The firm’s net debt to earnings ratio should also fall in [...]
FTSE falters as Vodafone and Amec see falls February 14, 2013 BENCHMARK share index fell from five-year highs, hit by weakness at telecoms group Vodafone and engineer AMEC, although many traders stayed positive on equities for the longer term. The blue-chip FTSE 100 index, which touched a five-year intraday high on Wednesday, closed down 0.5 per cent, or 31.75 points lower, at 6,327.36 yesterday. Some traders [...]
Wall St treads water despite surge in M&A February 14, 2013 THE S&P 500 eked out a small gain for a third straight session yesterday, helped by a flurry of merger activity, though investors see no catalysts to lift the market further with major averages near multi-year highs. The market’s slowed advance took the S&P 500 to its highest intraday level since November 2007 on Wednesday. [...]
The three geopolitical red herrings that the markets can safely ignore February 14, 2013 EACH year, Eurasia Group releases its top risks report, where we consider the ten biggest geopolitical threats to markets and economies, judged by probability and potential impact. So what’s on our radar for 2013? The top risk is now found in emerging markets, as the world’s focus shifts back to the developing world and away [...]
Voice of a new political rhetoric highlights the need for intellectual humility February 14, 2013 THERE was an important speech in America this week, and it wasn’t made by Barack Obama. The President’s State of the Union address was, once again, a conventional recitation of the technocrat’s creed: state intervention can solve almost everything, so long as smart people like me make it smarter. Marco Rubio’s speech wasn’t important either. [...]
How EU regulation has prevented UK horse meat action February 14, 2013 DAVID Cameron’s enthusiasm for the Single Market must be taking a knock, as the horse meat scandal gallops on. It is, after all, one of the fundamental four freedoms of the Single Market – the free movement of goods – that prohibits environment secretary Owen Paterson from banning imports of suspect meat. But the EU [...]
The Debate: After GDP contracted in France and Germany, can we still be optimistic about the Eurozone? February 14, 2013 YES Christian Schulz The Eurozone’s turning point, Mario Draghi’s European Central Bank safety net, happened before the fourth quarter of 2012 even started. It triggered a chain reaction of improving confidence, which was just too slow to prevent this downturn. Capital returned to the periphery, but Eurozone leaders still needed to prove their resolve to [...]
Letters to the Editor February 14, 2013 Cost of inflation [Re: High inflation is denting recovery: The Bank of England must act now, yesterday] The idea that a weaker pound would somehow promote an export boom is absurd. Most of our exports are either specialised services, which would be purchased anyway, or specialised manufacturing, which tends to require goods to be imported in [...]
