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“Building Britain’s Future” is the title of today’s budget, but it will be a document mired in the past. The figures released at lunchtime will make the wrong sort of long-term history, marking public debts and deficits never before seen in peacetime. But really this is a budget about recent history, about the calamitous carnage…
The budget is less than 48 hours away, yet there may be as much left out of this document as put in. Certainly the single biggest budget decision made since November’s mini-budget may or may not score in the number crunching: a likely loss of tens of billions from the government insurance scheme for the…
Jon Snow
I had dinner last night with a private equity guy who is still in the money. Interesting entity. He tipped me to something I had not thought about.
Jon Snow
I return from my “hostile environment” course with the word exsanguate ringing in my ears. It’s not a word I knew. But you cannot deal with battlefield scenarios without coming across the appalling prospect of an arterial bleed. Pumping red, the stuff exsanguates from the body, and the only response, if it is in the…
Jon Snow
I shan’t be around for the next couple of days. I’m going off to be kidnapped, bundled up in a sack, immersed in thick mud, and shot at. I’ll also be updating my first aid skills. Once every three years in this business you have to go off and be “refreshed” on the hostile environment…
Jon Snow
Yes, it’s official, we are in charge of Lloyds Banking Group, aka Lloyds TSB HBOS. In fact we didn’t know it. But we’ve had it since 13 October last year. According to a release that lands on our desks this morning, the Office of National Statistics has deemed that both RBS (which we already knew…
Jon Snow
I spent last night hosting the Channel 4 Political Awards. I’ll talk about them in one of my next blogs. But the point is, I was in the very heart of the Westminster village, where journalists, politicians, lobbyists and the rest become, briefly, one.
Jon Snow
The sight of Dennis Stevenson – Lord Stevenson of Coddenham – in front of MPs yesterday recalled the heady days of new Labour, when he was a central go-between, even the gateway, for Labour’s then new love affair with business. Stevenson symbolises the consultant, a breed of service provider born of the late 1960s and…
Jon Snow
Given that this was the first occasion that any of the bosses of the failed banks had appeared in any forum to give an account of their role in the turmoil that has beset Britain’s banking system, today’s scene in the House of Commons was low key, to say the least. The man the financial…
Jon Snow
I am watching these four bankers before the treasury select committee in the Commons. And I am watching our elected representatives struggling to rise to what is expected of them. The MPs are manifestly under-briefed in comparison with their American counterparts, who have large teams working on a thing like this. Our representatives have the…
Jon Snow
Sir Tom McKillop has stepped down as chairman of RBS, the bank you and I own 70 per cent of – and doubtless soon 100 per cent of. Sir Tom’s bank recently posted the biggest loss in British corporate history: £28bn. The FT today calls his tenure as chairman “disastrous”. In no way do I…
Jon Snow
So MPs are finally beginning to dig around in what flowed from the banking system meltdown in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse. Of intimate British interest is the Isle of Man’s involvement with the Icelandic bank Kaupthing. The Isle of Man used to be in the news for TT motor cycle racing. These…
Jon Snow
I’m really chuffed with the responses that my initial appearance in the blogosphere have generated. Big problem at the moment: I’m under siege from the conventional medium of television to try to get Channel 4 News on the air tonight from Washington. But I am reading your comments with great interest, particularly on banking. And…
Jon Snow
The euphoria of the Obama swearing-in has very quickly been replaced here in Washington by the sober dawning of new morning. And a gloomy, overshadowed thing it feels to be. The speech he made at the podium beneath the Capitol was less rhetorical and more content-strewn than most had expected, and much of the content…
Within a week in October 2008 the US and UK governments were forced to bailout their banks in order to save the economic system as the credit crunch began to bite.