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Welcome to Peston’s Picks - the home of my reports and analysis of the issues in business that matter to us all
19 hours ago
Philip Hampton, chairman of RBS, used the "can't-live-with-them, can't-live-without-them" defence of bankers and their big pay today.
As I have mentioned before, he is firmly of the view that investment bankers and banking executives are paid too much - not because he is opposed to big pay, but because bankers' pay has become disconnected from rewards for shareholders.
13:18 UK time, Thursday, 2 February 2012
Some would argue there are two great bubbles in the world right now, in internet shares and commodities, but goodness how they manifest themselves differently on the stock market.
Today's manifestations of these phenomena are the merger talks between the mining and commodities trading groups Xstrata and Glencore, plus the announcement that Facebook will be coming to the stock market.
12:45 UK time, Wednesday, 1 February 2012
There is a lot of chatter around the place that somehow the government is becoming anti-business with the way it welcomed the de-knighting of Fred Goodwin and the pressure it put on RBS's board to slash Stephen Hester's bonus.
That doesn't feel quite right - not least because business is not some homogeneous collection of individuals and institutions, all of which have a common outlook and interest.
19:04 UK time, Tuesday, 31 January 2012
I keep being asked whether business leaders and bankers with knighthoods, CBEs and the rest should be living in terror that they too may be stripped of their honours following the decision of Her Majesty to de-sir Fred Goodwin, on the advice of Whitehall.
I don't really think so, because Fred Goodwin was in a class of his own, at least for the UK, in terms of taking business risks that damaged the wealth of taxpayers and undermined prospects for the British economy.
23:56 UK time, Sunday, 29 January 2012
It was Labour's decision to put Stephen Hester's bonus to a Commons vote that gave the RBS chief executive no option but to say he would not be taking £963,000 in shares.
As an RBS director put it to me, it would have been a great mistake for the semi-nationalised bank to fight parliament to preserve rewards for its chief executive seen by many as excessive.
11:50 UK time, Saturday, 28 January 2012
Earlier this month I mentioned that Royal Bank of Scotland's chairman Sir Philip Hampton was entitled to receive 5.17m shares in the bank later this year.
These would have been worth £1.4m at the current RBS share price.
20:40 UK time, Thursday, 26 January 2012
The Treasury is convinced that the board of Royal Bank of Scotland has taken its views into account, in paying a reduced bonus to Stephen Hester, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland.
But it is pretty difficult right now to judge whether that is true. Here is why.
13:01 UK time, Thursday, 26 January 2012
David Cameron and entourage have rolled into Davos to sell the investment potential of Olympic-year Britain to the business leaders, investors and bankers who throng the World Economic Forum's annual meeting.
But in his plenary address, he also delivered something of a lecture to the eurozone on what it needs to do insure the long-term survival and prosperity of the creaking currency union.
10:14 UK time, Thursday, 26 January 2012
On the official second day of the World Economic Forum here in Davos, I have just interviewed Baudouin Prot, the chairman of BNP Paribas, the huge French bank which is seen as one of Europe's stronger banks.
He had two or three pretty interesting claims to make - though I should say at the outset that not everyone will agree with him.
08:39 UK time, Wednesday, 25 January 2012
The UK is certainly not alone in debating whether the widening gap between the super-haves and the have-littles is an altogether good thing.
It is one of the big talking points here at the World Economic Forum, for an obvious reason.
19:50 UK time, Tuesday, 24 January 2012
Government pressure is building on Royal Bank of Scotland's board to announce that chief executive Stephen Hester is to receive a significantly reduced bonus.
I am hearing that the Treasury will inform the company that it believes Mr Hester should receive less than half the bonus of just over £2m that he was awarded last year. So that would be a bonus of less than £1m.
16:12 UK time, Tuesday, 24 January 2012
My train is chugging up the snow-carpeted mountain to the Alpine resort of Davos, once a refuge for consumptives and now, at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, home-from-home for the world's more conspicuous consumers (bankers, hedge fund managers, private-equity stars, inter alia).
It is therefore inevitable that a business editor's thoughts turn again to the widening gap between top people's remuneration and the rewards more widely available.
16:52 UK time, Monday, 23 January 2012
To curb the excesses of executive pay, Vince Cable has passed the buck back to shareholders.
Investors will be given the power to formally veto companies' future pay policies - although, as is the case now, if shareholders dislike how businesses have implemented the agreed policy, their votes will not be binding.
10:15 UK time, Monday, 23 January 2012
In a financial sense, spring is in the air. But is a chill wind about to blow from Greece that could snuff out the buds of growing investor and banker optimism?
Perhaps the most important manifestation of a markets thaw is that some banks have been able to sell debt - to borrow - again. As Morgan Stanley pointed out last week, European banks, or at least the stronger northern European variety, have issued more senior unsecured bonds in the first few days of this year than in the whole of the second half of last year.
16:59 UK time, Friday, 20 January 2012
Perhaps the most important cause of our economic malaise is that for years as a nation we have been living beyond our means, in deficit with the rest of the world, buying from other countries far more than we produce, till our indebtedness became unsustainable.
By contrast China has been consuming far less than it produces, accumulating vast surpluses.
09:26 UK time, Friday, 20 January 2012
Business leaders do like their gongs.
Many is the time, I have been rung up by a pal of an untitled business leader to be asked if I have any idea why he (it's always a he) hasn't been knighted yet - and enquiring what can be done about it (the supposition is that I know how the wheels and cogs of these things operate, though I am not sure I really do).
17:39 UK time, Thursday, 19 January 2012
Royal Bank of Scotland's remuneration committee and full board have not yet discussed in a formal sense whether the bank's chief executive Stephen Hester should receive a bonus for his performance in 2011 - as the bank perhaps peevishly pointed out today.
But - as I wrote yesterday - the bank's non-executive directors and its chairman, Sir Philip Hampton, are determined that he should receive one: probably around £1m, and rather more than that in respect of the so-called long-term incentive plan.
09:38 UK time, Thursday, 19 January 2012
The consultants McKinsey has returned to one of the business and economic issues of our age, the massive debts of the rich developed countries that borrowed excessively to fuel growth in the boom years.
In a new paper, with the racy title Debt and Deleveraging: uneven progress on the path to growth, McKinsey asserts that the task of reducing the indebtedness of consumer-led economies such as the UK and Spain is barely underway (and see my earlier post, UK's debts biggest in the world, for more on this).
14:55 UK time, Wednesday, 18 January 2012
The long-running crisis in the eurozone meant that the appetite for taking risks of companies and investors declined last year.
And when companies and investors choose to keep their money safe rather than putting it to work, there's a drop in fees, commissions and dealing spreads for investment banks such as Goldman Sachs.
10:29 UK time, Wednesday, 18 January 2012
Royal Bank of Scotland's shares have slumped more than 40% over the past year - so that taxpayers currently face losses of around £23bn on their 81% stake in the bank.
RBS has shed many thousands of jobs in that period. Also it recently announced that its investment bank was performing worse than it hoped, so RBS is abandoning share trading and advising companies on takeovers - and a further 3,500 jobs will go.
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.
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