The post-crisis challenge for central bankers has long seemed easy to describe. They must steer between the shoals of short-term…
Like two drowning men Iberia and British Airways have long eyed each other as potential means of mutual buoyancy. The…
CIT might just be that rarest of things: a financial-services firm that emerges from bankruptcy largely intact. The small-business lender…
Even at the height of the ex-communist countries? boom in 2006, almost half their citizens felt they lived worse than…
When the fire is raging, it is no time to worry about water damage. Central banks and governments have flooded…
America has some of the most flexible labour markets in the developed world, while continental Europe, in the popular imagination,…
Central banks in the rich world cut interest rates in lockstep in 2008 as the world economy spiralled. Their paths…
Neelie Kroes has, according to one analyst in London, ?cut through all the bullshit?. Europe?s competition commissioner has trod where…
America may lead the rich world in periods of prosperity, but Europe has shown a greater talent for dealing with…
America’s carmakers appear to have returned from the grave. This week the three big ones?Ford, General Motors and Chrysler?all had…
The usual laws of corporate finance do not seem to apply to banks. Almost all big industrial companies?and decent analysts…
European bank presentations used to be filled with graphs of assets that sloped pleasingly upward. For those at the mercy…
Uncertainty is different from risk, as Frank Knight, an economist, first pointed out in 1921. A poker player can figure…
Northern Rock was rescued in September 2007, more than a year before the much-bigger Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB…
In the half-century since private equity first appeared, the industry has produced stretches of great profitability, culminating in a spectacular…
On October 29 the government reported that gross domestic product rose at an annualised rate of 3.5% in the third…
Three years ago, when negotiations with the union representing air-traffic controllers reached an impasse, the administration of George Bush simply…
The Treasury could influence matters at RBS and Lloyds Banking Group, two big banks in which it has substantial shareholdings,…
