Sunderland Liverpool September 13, 2012 IT has been an incredibly emotional week for everyone involved with Liverpool Football Club and if ever a team is likely to be fired up for a game, it is the Reds against Sunderland in tomorrow’s early evening kick-off. Brendan Rodgers, similarly to Villas-Boas, will be very disappointed with the start his team has made [...]
Even dead cats can bounce back to life August 20, 2012 WHEN things go disastrously wrong, the market is always ready to obliterate a stock. It could be because of mistakes made in a company’s operations, as in the case of Carnival earlier this year when one of its liners ran aground off Italy’s west coast. It could be like Facebook’s IPO, where the price rose [...]
The Manchester medal factory: Be grateful for this strange cluster of genius August 16, 2012 THE Manchester velodrome is a medal factory. It won as many golds in this summer’s Olympics as the whole of Australia. As well as a cause for national celebration, that’s a problem. Because the truth is, we don’t know enough about why. Genius clusters. Renaissance Florence. Elizabethan London. The Scottish Enlightenment. Extraordinary individual achievements, sporting [...]
Give the mod a home: Wiggo’s canine honour August 2, 2012 SPORTING immortality, lucrative endorsement deals, invites to swanky parties where the drinks are free – some things go with the territory of becoming an Olympic champion. But Britain’s first gold medallists of London 2012, cycling messiah Bradley Wiggins and rowing wunderkinds Helen Glover and Heather Stanning, have also been honoured in less conventional fashion. In [...]
I Against I is a formulaic, humourless crime flop August 2, 2012 FILM I AGAINST I Cert 15 | By Steve Dinneen ** THE British crime drama hasn’t fared very well since the glory days of The Long Good Friday; all Danny Dyer romps and hackneyed mockney geezers. I Against I does little to redress the balance. Co-directors Mark Cripps, David Ellison and James Marquand set out [...]
No fear of dead cat bounces here July 15, 2012 EARLY risers were greeted yesterday by a bungee ballet over the Thames. At 7.30am, 16 performers leapt from the Millennium Bridge to touch the water before flying back up. Inspired by a Latin American rite of passage, this hair-raising spectacle was the opening act in a whole day of gravity-defying action commissioned by the Mayor [...]
High-frequency trading is not the devil behind every market mishap July 15, 2012 TO SAY that high-frequency trading (HFT) is blamed for every big financial mishap is to exaggerate – but only slightly. Regardless of the hard evidence from academics, exchanges and regulators about the positive impact of HFT, the critics continue to dominate headlines. It’s not hard to see why. Innovation in any industry has always attracted [...]
Barclays loses bond issue as Libor hits deals July 12, 2012 BARCLAYS yesterday lost its first major business since the Libor-fixing scandal began, as a Japanese bank pulled out of a bond issue worth around $1bn. The state-backed Japan Bank for International Cooperation had included Barclays among three banks advising on a five-year bond offering but left it out of the final offering. “Barclays was dropped [...]
One Abe struggles to overcome silliness as another battles against grinding cynicism June 21, 2012 FILM DARK HORSE Cert 15 *** Dark Horse takes the indie template dragged into the mainstream by films like Juno and Superbad, removes the Hollywood niceties and replaces them with a bleakly funny desperation. Abe is an overweight man-child who collects ThunderCats dolls and still lives with his parents. He’s the kind of guy nobody [...]
RAPID responses June 17, 2012 Broken spring [Re: Are shareholder revolts over executive pay a coherent response to poor performance?, Friday] The shareholder spring is another example of a public spurred on by a militant minority, and fuelled by a mixture of jealousy and ignorance. Anyone earning more than double the average wage has been branded a fat cat and [...]