by Hugo Dixon It is perhaps too much to expect Britain’s Conservative-led government to lead any initiatives on Europe, such is the orgy of self-destruction in the party over whether the UK should stay in the European Union. But, insofar as David Cameron manages to get some respite from the madness, he should launch a strategy to enhance the City of London as Europe’s financial

by Heidi Moore Barely had the ink dried on Yahoo’s announcement of its $1.1bn acquisition of Tumblr — “we won’t screw it up,” the acquirer promised — than the New York tech world erupted in gossip and speculation about which company among them would be next to find an equally rich and self-deprecating corporate suitor. “That’s all people a

by Polly Toynbee The French call it l’esprit de l’escalier, that brilliant thought on the way out, too late for some brilliant aperçu. Alas, that is Sir Mervyn King’s parting contribution as he warns that the Help to Buy scheme risks setting off a housing bubble. In his long years at the Bank of England he presided nonchalantly over one housing boom after another, d

By Jason Lange and David Lawder The chances of a deal between Democratic and Republican lawmakers that would overhaul the US tax system, trim government spending and reform safety net spending programmes appear to be fading. A sudden improvement in the outlook for the US government deficit over the next decade has alleviated some of the pressure on lawmakers to act. And a spate of scand

by charles arthur At Google’s developer conference in San Francisco, its chief executive Larry Page took part in an impromptu Q&A session. What, one person asked, was the point of the company’s rollout of optical fibre networking in places such as Kansas City, where it is offering connections that run at 1,000 megabits per second (100 times faster than the best in the UK) fo

By Nicholas Wapshott In the nearly five years since the worst financial crash since the Great Depression, the remedy for the world’s economic doldrums has swung from full-on Keynesianism to unforgiving austerity and back. The initial Keynesian response halted the collapse in economic activity. But it was soon met by borrowers’ remorse in the shape of paying down debt and rai

Turkey’s achievement of investment-grade status crowns a decade of rapid growth, financial stability and political reform by a “tiger” economy on the seam of Europe and Asia, but the rising power still faces pitfalls in a dangerous neighbourhood. Moody’s Investors Service raised its rating on Ankara’s sovereign bonds to Baa3, or investment grade, from Ba1 late

By Allison Martell Hope is fading for a global deal to regulate the airline industry’s greenhouse gas emissions ahead of a fall deadline, even though failure could push the industry back to the brink of a trade war over the European Union’s emissions trading system. Last November the EU suspended its controversial scheme to force all airlines to buy carbon credits for any fl

By Manuela Badawy With the world’s biggest central banks driving yields on safe assets to near zero, some investors are tossing caution to the wind and rushing to buy illiquid and previously overlooked bonds sold by countries with no capital markets track record. Even the biggest investors acknowledge that “frontier markets” like Vietnam and Romania aren’t for th

  ATHENS:  Greece’s second-largest lender Piraeus Bank has hired four international investment banks as advisers on its ¤7.33bn ($9.4bn) share issue, two bankers close to the procedure said yesterday. “Goldman, Barclays, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America-Merrill Lynch will be acting as advisers,” one of the bankers said. Greece’s top four ban

By Marina Hyde Whenever I think of those iconoclasts at Google, changing the very essence of business one totally awesome logo doodle at a time, I remember a New York Times article about a Waldorf school that featured a girl called Andie. Based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, this school is a studiedly old-fashioned place of blackboards and chalk, where the classroom tools are things su

By felix salmon Jamie Dimon is wagging his finger from newstands across America this week, above the kind of headline his PR team can only dream of: “DIMON IS FOREVER: Why Jamie Dimon is Wall Street’s Indispensable Man”. The story itself, by Nick Summers and Max Abelson, consists mainly of rich corporate insider types talking about how wonderful Jamie Dimon is, and how

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By Tom Miles As British Prime Minister David Cameron struggles to accommodate eurosceptics in his party, trade experts warn that quitting the European Union would force Britain not just to rework trade relations with the EU, but also with the EU’s trade partners and probably the World Trade Organization. Moreover, it would struggle to maintain the same level of trading rights it e

By Chrystia Freeland One of the most urgent questions in economics today is the connection between inequality and growth. That is because one of the big economic facts of our time is the surge in income disparity, particularly between those at the very top and everyone else. The other big fact is the recession set off by the financial crisis and the consequent imperative to jump-start econo

By simon jenkins What a surprise. The National Audit Office has found a £3.3bn hole in the finances of the high-speed rail link HS2.  It doubts if the project will do much for Britain’s economic growth or the “north-south divide”. It also questions the benefit of shorter journey times in an age of Wi-Fi and 3G. To the strident Margaret Hodge, of the Commons

By Ann Pettifor The British Broadcasting Corporation’s headline fairly trumpets the news: “French economy returns to recession”. Funny how we Brits seem happy if our trans-Manche neighbours are doing a wee bit worse than we are. Especially if you can add that it is the fault of their government for being, well, a bit too left of centre. True, the French have just enter

By Felix Salmon Ezra Klein has a good summary of the latest CBO budget projections, which show that the national debt really isn’t going to be a problem at any point in the foreseeable future.  The deficit isn’t going away, of course: the smallest it’s likely to get, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is $378bn, or 2.1 percent of GDP, in 2015. 

By Vince Cable Panic is not a good basis for rational, long-term decision-making. But Britain’s main right-wing party, or much of it, seems to have decided that the best response to an insurgent competitor is jumping off a cliff, leading the country into a void of uncertainty. Retired ex-chancellors can perhaps be forgiven a bout of self-indulgence, but my cabinet colleagues shoul

by felix salmon Dan Primack is excited about a new bill which would give small-cap companies the option to have their stocks be quoted at 5-cent or 10-cent increments rather than the standard one-cent gap. He explains: The first part of this is surely true: Analysts and market-makers do tend to ignore small-cap stocks. But from there on in, things start getting very sketchy. For