324 items found
Jon Snow
I am standing on a balcony sixteen floors above the Amazon leaning on the railing talking with Brazil’s President Lula. An exceptional life story has taken him from a 12-year-old shoeshine boy, via work at a sheet metal factory where he lost the little finger of his left hand in an industrial accident, to his…
In the not-very-funny economics joke, the IMF stands for “it’s mostly fiscal”. That’s a reference to its long-held ideology of forcing developing countries to cut spending and budget deficits in response to almost any financial crisis. It was a sort of cosmic chastity belt on fiscal profligacy. So what better ally for the prospective iron…
Today’s inflation number may contain a clue as to the next populist backlash initiated by desperate politicians. Speculators must surely be next in line for the pre-election chopping block. Oil traders in particular can surely not be spared from growing public anger over petrol prices. There is, I’m told, a glut of oil and petrol…
A windswept beach. A university town. And a few hundred protesters dressed as finance ministers symbolically burying their heads sand. It’s a lot harder to protest against the G7 rich man’s club, now that it’s the G20. The agenda is somewhat more murky when it is China refusing to discuss climate finance, rather than the…
ST ANDREWS, SCOTLAND – In the grounds of St Andrews’ famous Fairmont hotel there are some acclaimed championship golf courses. I doubt very much that the G20 finance ministers and central bankers arriving here tonight will be teeing off. Having “saved the world economy” in Act 1, Act 2 appears to be the no less…
Jon Snow
I’ve just done a ‘sit down’ with David Cameron, and met his wife too – tall, elegant, very personable. We all met on the 23rd floor of the Hilton here in Manchester, an eerily deserted place with splendid views across the jumble that is Manchester and the sun kissed Pennines beyond. Talked with Cameron for…
Can you believe it was almost a year ago that “President Elect” Barak Obama told an ecstatic crowd in Chicago that “Change had come to America”? With less than a month to go before the first anniversary of that speech a lot of people in America are asking themselves whether much of that change has…
Gary Gibbon
The main five British banks will be doling out some jumbo bonuses after Christmas, after the Chancellor met remuneration bosses first thing this morning at the Treasury and the banks said they would abide by the G20 rules which the government intends to bring into law in 2010.
Jon Snow
Oh I do like to be beside the sea…well normally anyway and this Labour Party Conference is very far from “normal”. For a start it is flat, flat as yer hat. Secondly all those luvvies, or most of them, have evaporated back whence they came. We are down to the formidable rump of Trades Unionists…
Gary Gibbon
Alistair Darling will today tell the conference here that he’s going to talk to the bankers and tell them to restrain themselves this Christmas.
Populism does not come more de-robed than what we will get on bankers from Labour’s pre-election conference. It starts today with the Chancellors speech. There will be an elaboration of the bank bashing theme.
Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein on the wisdom of allowing big banks to fail.
There was one bright spot in the Prime Minister’s day at the UN on Thursday. Colonel Gaddafi did not bother to turn up for the security council meeting. It’s just a coincidence that Libya happens to hold one of the rotating seats on the council at the moment but we all expected it was a…
Snub-gate has made it on board Air Force One. The row over whether or not Gordon Brown was “snubbed” by President Obama because he didn’t get a sit-down, one-on-one, meeting with him (despite repeated requests from Downing Street) has now been taken up by the White House press corps. On board the presidential plane…
Gordon Brown is a very angry man today. That much was obvious from my all too brief encounter with him this afternoon. I was holed up in the tiny offices the British mission have here in the UN building along with political editors from BBC, ITV Sky and Five News. Waiting to take our turns…