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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
15 hours ago
The memo written by Jeremy Hunt in November about News Corp's BSkyB bid seems to explain almost everything that transpired in relation to the bid over the succeeding six months or so.
Here is the important passage:
00:00 UK time, Thursday, 24 May 2012
Andrew Bailey, a director of the Bank of England who will soon become the City's top regulator, has said that free banking is dangerous and needs to be reformed by the government.
Bailey says that free banking both misleads customers about how they are really paying for banking services, and also means that banks themselves may not properly understand the costs of the products and services they supply.
12:00 UK time, Wednesday, 23 May 2012
In recent months, investors have been lending tens of billions of pounds of interest-free money to the British government: only when the Exchequer wants to borrow for more than ten years has it been forced to pay a rate of interest that is likely to exceed the inflation rate (see here for more on this).
So the real interest rate on George Osborne's debt is less than zero; that's what we would have called jammy, a few years back.
08:45 UK time, Tuesday, 22 May 2012
Only one of the Bank of England's three reviews into how it has conducted itself since the crisis of 2008 is being carried out by a commercial banker. In this case it is Bill Winters, rather than a former central banker (by the way, I should warn you that this is a blog BOGOF: reflections on JP Morgan and on the Bank of England's self-examination).
Whether that will make his probe more or less impartial, you can decide. But Mr Winters has a reputation - acquired when he was co-head of JP Morgan Investment Bank - for being his own person.
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.
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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