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It was brave of Lord Turner to take his controversial take on the future of finance directly to an audience of black-tied bankers at the Mansion House. He was heckled, and the mood music in the City, and apparently at the dinner too, seems to resemble the attitude of a teenager who has been banned…
Gary Gibbon
A White House “readout” of the phone call between President Obama and the Prime Minister reveals something that seems to have slipped off the No. 10 version of events.
About two years ago I met one of the top British bankers and asked for an opinion on Brown/Darling vs Cameron/Osborne. I was shocked to hear his scepticism about the Tory business policy versus the government. To be clear, this was Brown at his absolute peak, still ahead in the polls, just before Northern Rock…
Size does matter to the G20 finance ministers. We know this in relation to the extent of the recovery. Some feel recovery has bedded down sufficiently to allow talk of ‘exit strategies’ from the extraordinary stimulus seen around the world. Others, including the chancellor, fear that “the biggest single risk to recovery is that people…
Just what has been achieved here? The summit’s warm words on climate change were criticised by the UN secretary-general himself yesterday, who said they did not go far enough. China and India now “recognise the scientific view” that temperatures should not go more than 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, but whether they are prepared to…
By the time you are reading this I hope to be supping on mozzarella di bufala in a medieval Italian hilltop town full of churches stuffed with paintings by Renaissance masters. The reality will probably be that I shall be going through umpteen security scanners along with some 3000 other journalists queuing for the G8…
Today the chancellor is going into the lion’s den to defend the bankers. Europe feels that Britain failed to regulate the City ‘casino’ properly, and helped stoke the financial disaster that caused the recession across Europe. The European Commission has come up with proposals that would give two continent-wide institutions the ultimate ability to regulate…
Economic diplomacy is back in a big way. That was the message from last month’s G20 summit, and it continues today with high-level UK-China chinwag. The system that failed the world plunging trade and global growth to contractions not seen since World War Two was a system that was international. Gaps in regulation existed between…
Jon Snow
A balmy bank holiday weekend for sailing. Despite the fact that my cousin Peter Snow has had a boat ever since I can remember, I don’t set sail with him enough. This weekend reminded me of both the joys and perils of sailing. A thousand sails swept along the Solent in brisk winds. Within hours…
On a day when deflation becomes official on Britain’s most commonly watched price measure, when the IMF suggests the world’s financial system is barely a quarter of the way through dealing with $4.1tr of rotting toxic assets (and that doesn’t even include the infamous stockpile of uranium that Lehman owns), an enterprising economist might ask…
How events have unfolded since Ian Tomlinson collapsed at the G20 protests in the London on 1 April 2009.
Watch out for my colleague Alex Thomson’s report tonight on how the much-hyped G20 protests, policed at a cost of millions, were today dominated by a few hundred Somalis, Ethiopians and Eritreans, which was not what much of the media, on hand in case of a scuffle, had in mind. They were protesting about human…
Jon Snow
Just recorded this from the ExCel Centre where today’s G20 fun and games are taking place. The video is a perfectly formed 16 seconds. Enjoy.
Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, is supposed to represent the whole of Africa at the G20 this week – apart from the South Africans, who are the only African G20 members. Yesterday afternoon one of his advisers told me she doesn’t want him to be seen as yet another African leader out with the begging…
Jon Snow
I have just emerged from the World Bank offices in Millbank and an interview with its president, Robert Zoellick. He has a formidable intellect and interesting moustache. He too had a flyer’s cold. I told him of the benefits of squirting saline water up your nasal passages in the morning and at night. He was grateful.…