~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~17~RS~)
Welcome to Peston’s Picks - the home of my reports and analysis of the issues in business that matter to us all
00:00 UK time, Friday, 18 May 2012
The National Audit Office's estimate, that the government will ultimately lose £2bn on the privatisation of part of Northern Rock and the winding down of the rest, may sound painful for taxpayers.
But actually it could have been a lot worse.
23:12 UK time, Thursday, 17 May 2012
Robert added analysis to:
Although the influence of ratings agencies can be overstated, the timing of Moody's decision to reduce the rating of 16 banks and the UK subsidiary of Santander could hardly have been worse because it comes at a time when investor and creditor confidence in Spanish banks has been eroded.
The downgrades are due in part to the difficulties Spain is having in cutting its deficit and concerns that it lacks the resources to support struggling banks in a crisis.
10:06 UK time, Thursday, 17 May 2012
Creating the currency union was not a random act of collective economic suicide, but was in some senses a rational or even noble project that was either premature or too late. The tragedy was that a succession of post-war leaders, whose intentions would be seen by many as honourable, made a series of disastrously ill-timed decisions.
Here is a great paradox: the big decision to press the button on creating the euro was a French attempt to shackle the economic and political power of a unifying Germany, but it has had the perverse consequence of reinforcing German power within the eurozone and the European Union.
09:36 UK time, Wednesday, 16 May 2012
Regulators could not be happier about JP Morgan's loss of at least $2bn that was generated by its Chief Investment Office.
On the one hand, it didn't sink JP Morgan: the bank has enough equity and is generating sufficient profit to absorb the loss.
20:14 UK time, Tuesday, 15 May 2012
Robert added analysis to:
Nobody I speak to outside Greece can come up with any route for Greece that is painless for its people. Stay in the euro: belt-tightening, more impoverishment; more reduction in living standards. Go out: the same kind of impact on living standards.
Maybe - and this is what some people believe - if they dropped the euro for a new drachma, and were able to retain some access to credit, perhaps from the IMF, the transition for Greece wouldn't be quite as painful.
10:27 UK time, Monday, 14 May 2012
I am mildly bemused that central bank governors seem to be talking with some equanimity about Greece leaving the euro: the Belgian central bank governor describes an "amicable divorce" as "possible"; his Irish counterpart says a Greek exit is "not necessarily fatal" though plainly not attractive.
The point, as I am sure you know by now, is that the eurozone crisis is a sovereign debt crisis and an inextricably connected banking crisis (and to get my plug in early, if you want to know more about this, you could watch "The Great Euro Crash, with Robert Peston" this coming Thursday on BBC2 at 9pm).
15:39 UK time, Friday, 11 May 2012
For Spain, it does not look like fourth time lucky.
Since the global banking crisis of 2008, there have been four attempts by the Spanish government - two by the current one, two by its predecessor - to shore up a banking system seriously weakened by reckless property and construction loans.
08:06 UK time, Friday, 11 May 2012
JPMorgan has a reputation for being one of the better managed and more cautious of the world's huge banks.
But that reputation has taken a serious knock with the disclosure last night that a trading desk in London has lost $2bn - and perhaps more - on deals in what are known as corporate credit derivatives, or insurance against the danger of loans to companies going bad.
21:22 UK time, Wednesday, 9 May 2012
The big question for Spain and for the eurozone is whether it is a giant version of the Republic of Ireland.
To put this another way, will the cost of rehabilitating its banking system be greater than Spanish taxpayers can afford?
10:52 UK time, Wednesday, 9 May 2012
Today's Queen's Speech heralds a constitutional change for the UK's corporate citizens.
The government will amend company law so that shareholder votes on big businesses' prospective remuneration plans for executives will be binding - as opposed to the current system of advisory votes (which have the power to embarrass companies but not to compel them).
09:08 UK time, Tuesday, 8 May 2012
Today Andrew Moss quit as chief executive of the insurance giant Aviva.
Last week, Sly Bailey announced she would be standing down from the newspaper group Trinity Mirror.
08:34 UK time, Friday, 4 May 2012
Having stalled a bit during last year's eurozone crisis, the recovery at Royal Bank of Scotland seems to be picking up some momentum again.
Its operating profit bounced back to £1.18bn, up very fractionally from the beginning of last year and - importantly - a big swing from the £144m loss for the fourth quarter of 2011.
16:54 UK time, Thursday, 3 May 2012
It is a very unusual event for a FTSE100 company to be defeated in shareholder votes on what they pay their top executives.
In the decade since shareholders obtained the right to vote on what public companies have paid their senior people for the past year and what they plan to pay them for the coming year - the contents of the so-called remuneration report - just three FTSE 100 businesses have lost the votes (according to research by Manifest).
08:12 UK time, Thursday, 3 May 2012
It is odd how different people see the same event.
Last night, I heard Sir Mervyn King, in the Today Programme Lecture, largely excusing the Bank of England for its failure to prevent the great crash of 2007-8: he blamed the recklessness of banks; he blamed a collective "failure of imagination" to see that banks' huge increase in lending was the mother of all dangerous bubbles waiting to burst; he blamed the last Labour government for stripping the Bank of England in 1997 of its direct powers to regulate banks.
11:37 UK time, Tuesday, 1 May 2012
The bombshell is on page 70 of the report by the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee into News International and phone-hacking.
It is worth quoting in full:
08:39 UK time, Tuesday, 1 May 2012
There was some good news for taxpayers in Lloyds' latest results.
The bank which became more dependent than any other on loans from the Bank of England and the Treasury at the height of the 2007-8 financial crisis has almost completely repaid what it owes taxpayers.
00:02 UK time, Tuesday, 1 May 2012
Tactics described as a "shake down" are raising an estimated £70m for taxpayers from a private-equity fund that was originally owned by the government.
Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary, will announce later today that he is selling the government's residual 40% stake in Actis, the world's leading emerging-markets private-equity fund, for $10m (£6.2m) in cash plus a large future share of what is known as carried interest in three funds.
08:06 UK time, Monday, 30 April 2012
National Australia Bank has been reviewing what to do with its substantial UK operation, Clydesdale - which also owns Yorkshire Bank and operates mainly in Scotland and the north of England - since January.
Because of an economic downturn in the UK described by NAB's chief executive Cameron Clyne as "longer and slower to recover than experienced in the 1930s following the Great Depression", the bank has decided to cut 1,400 UK jobs, pull out of commercial property lending here and concentrate on retail and small business banking.
16:37 UK time, Friday, 27 April 2012
In spite of widespread public anger about the millions of pounds paid to top bankers and executives of other companies, ministers have chosen not to intervene directly.
Instead they have called on shareholders to take a closer interest in executive pay - and to protest when executive rewards are deemed to be excessive.
15:56 UK time, Thursday, 26 April 2012
Last week Ofcom requested of News International that it hand over information on hacking.
It wants the documents that News Int has been ordered by Lord Justice Moss to give to alleged hacking victims who are suing the UK newspaper group owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
Robert has won numerous awards for his journalism, including Journalist of the Year, Specialist Journalist of the Year and Scoop of the Year (twice) from the Royal Television Society, Performer of the Year from the Broadcasting Press Guild, and Broadcaster of the Year and Journalist of the Year from the Wincott Foundation.
Prior to joining the BBC, he was political editor and financial editor of the Financial Times, City Editor of the Sunday Telegraph and a columnist for the New Statesman and Sunday Times.
He broadcast and published a series of influential reports about the causes and consequences of the global financial crisis.
Stephanie Flanders
Economics editor
Thoughts on the UK economy and how it affects us all
Nick Robinson
Political editor
The latest on what’s going on in and around politics
Paul Mason
Economics editor, Newsnight
Reports and insight into people, planet and profit
BBC © 2012 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.
This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.
