Business Comment

Jeremy Warner: ITV is still struggling to make the grade in brave new world

Outlook Poor old Michael Grade. Two years ago, the media veteran quit the licence fee-insulated environment of the BBC to take on the challenge of turning around ITV, and he actually produced a half-way decent plan for doing so.

Inside Business Comment

Jeremy Warner: Barclays mulls £50bn of asset protection

Thursday, 5 March 2009

Outlook Lloyds Banking Group is said to be stamping its feet in rage over the penalty terms of participation in the Government's Asset Protection Scheme. Regrettably for the chief executive, Eric Daniels, he has little option but to bend over and take what ever punishment the civil servants choose to impose. There is no point in him bleating that the Government owes him one for helping out with HBOS. He bought into a pig in a poke when he merged with the beleaguered mortgage bank, and he now has to live with the all too brutal consequences.

Jeremy Warner: Wheeler gets the bullet at Brixton

Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Outlook: Personally, I rather liked Tim Wheeler, the now ex-chief executive of Brixton Estates, but he was not well liked in the City. Among property analysts, he was thought smug and uncommunicative, and though the strategy of concentrating on industrial space, much of it within the M25, seemed fair enough, few believed Mr Wheeler's insistence that Brixton was better placed than other property companies to weather the storm.

Jeremy Warner: The dividend gusher is over

Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Outlook: One of the reasons why stock markets are still crashing is the outlook for dividends, which has turned truly dire. Over time, most of the return on equities comes from dividends, so the virtual cessation of these payments is as much if not more of a concern to long-term equity investors as the present loss of value.

Jeremy Warner: A standard-bearer for Britain’s banks. Pity they didn’t follow it

Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Outlook: Is Standard Chartered the only solvent bank left in Britain? At a recent conference, Stephen Green, the chairman of HSBC, was introduced by Tony Blair as about the only banker left who dared show his face in public during daylight hours. I'm not sure that after this week's results and accompanying rights issue, that even the measured Mr Green still counts as the acceptable face of banking.

Jeremy Warner: HSBC's blockbuster rights further rattles skittish investors

Tuesday, 3 March 2009

Outlook: The HSBC rights issue was only part of a heady cocktail of negatives from across the globe

Stephen King: As capitalism stares into the abyss, was Marx right all along?

Monday, 2 March 2009

We may avoid a 1930s Depression but the best we can hope for may be a 1990s Japan

Hamish McRae: Deficit of realism. America assumes a lot in its road map to recovery

Sunday, 1 March 2009

The US economy is in an even worse state than we thought. The response to the stimulus plan signed off last week by President Obama was pretty negative, and the plight of the big US banks remains as dire as ever.

Margareta Pagano: Fraud Office probe is the only way to rebuild confidence

Sunday, 1 March 2009

We can't rely on anyone else to sort out the banks

Jeremy Warner: Time to stop talking down banking assets

Saturday, 28 February 2009

Outlook: If every house on your street was put up for sale all at the same time and it was announced that they must all be sold within the week, you wouldn't expect to get much for your property. OK, so you might get lucky and a property developer with cash (not that common these days) comes along to buy the lot. But even then, he would expect a bargain and you would only get a fraction of your house's long-term value.

Jeremy Warner: A right royal shocker from Lloyds chiefs

Saturday, 28 February 2009

Outlook: So where's the Lloyds Banking Group asset protection deal? The markets were all lined up to expect an announcement similar in size and detail to what Royal Bank of Scotland had outlined the day before, and then nothing.

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