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  1. Finance Blogger: Anthony Harrington

    Hedge funds back in favour

    Hedge funds had a torrid time through the great crash of 2008/09. Even funds that considerably outperformed the mainstream equity markets (which lost 40% or so of their value) were not immune from investor panic and saw massive outflows as investors became wildly risk-averse, preferring near zero interest on Treasury bonds to any kind of risk-based strategy. Hedge funds that got caught in the sub-prime fiasco, or that had invested heavily in credit default swaps, got caught…

  2. Finance Blogger: Anthony Harrington

    A blow for free speech, or the end of free speech?

    On January 21st the US Supreme Court overturned a long-standing ban on corporate entities using their financial muscle to fund prospective candidates to Federal office. Why does this matter? The banks are among the richest companies in the US. Until the Supreme Court decision, they were restricted to making their anti-regulation case heard by funding armies of lobbyists. In future they will be in a position to fund preferred candidates to political office as lavishly as…

  3. Finance Blogger: Anthony Harrington

    Cadbury—The chairman’s dilemma

    It is unfortunate, but often unavoidable, that chairmen and CEOs of household name public companies who are put under the spotlight of a contested takeover tend to end up looking to Joe Public like unprincipled hypocrites. Nor is this a minor matter, for it does no good to the business community to have its star figures coming out of these episodes looking a bit like politicians who are past their sell-by date, tatty, chewed to destruction, and with near zero credibility…

  4. Finance Blogger: Anthony Harrington

    German economy—Cautious optimism but job losses to 2011

    As one of the major motors of the eurozone, the health of the German economy is of huge significance to businesses in Europe and beyond. In its report for December 2009 the Bundesbank makes what it can of a not particularly pretty picture. The good news is that Germany seems to have turned the corner and got itself back into growth mode—no surprise there, since the emergence of the German economy from recession was trumpeted far and wide in 2009. The bad news is…

  5. Finance Blogger: Anthony Harrington

    Banking futures: Smaller and safer? Maybe, maybe not…

    The notion that banks have learned the lessons of the great crash of 2008/2009 is starting to look a little shaky. US players like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are once again racking up the numbers on the profit front. Plus some commentators are now expressing considerable skepticism that the Banking Bill put forward by the US Congress actually does much to reign in the banks (no mention, for example, of “too big to fail” as an issue)…

  6. Finance Blogger: Anthony Harrington

    Mining and insurance—Dialogue or bust...

    Insurance is a vital element of any business’s defense against the unforeseen. For “ordinary” high street businesses protection insurance might have its challenges but it is a game that insurers and many businesses—one hesitates to say “most businesses”—understand. Writing insurance business for mining companies is a different game entirely, and it is one that is fraught with difficulties for insurers. Take 2008 for example…

  7. Finance Blogger: Anthony Harrington

    MBOs—Down but not out

    While the MBO figures in the UK for the fourth quarter of 2009 have still to emerge, what is beyond dispute is that the overall value of UK buyouts for the first nine months of 2009 has tanked by comparison with the same period in 2008. According to figures from the Centre for Management Buy-Out Research (CMBOR) at Nottingham University, the numbers are down by more than three quarters (77%), at just £4.3 billion, by comparison with £18.3 billion…

  8. Finance Blogger: Ian Fraser

    HSBC goes with the economic flow

    If you need tangible evidence that economic power is ebbing away from Western financial centers such as London towards more dynamic economies in Asia, then look no further than HSBC’s decision to move its head office from London to Hong Kong. Ahead of next week’s historic move, which reverses the bank’s 1992 move from Hong Kong to London (a UK government requirement without which the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank would not have been allowed to…

  9. Finance Blogger: Anthony Harrington

    Asset bubbles, to act or not to act…

    With the global economy struggling to recover from the implosion of the US subprime real estate bubble and the toxic derivatives that fed off it, there is a growing sense among regulators that asset bubbles need, somehow, to be pricked before they reach Gargantuan proportions. In the teeth of this general clamor for “something to be done,” Adam Posen’s speech on December 1 to the MPR Monetary Policy and the Markets Conference in London sounds…

  10. Finance Blogger: Anthony Harrington

    Google in China—A thorny lesson unfolds

    What to do? Doing business with the world’s second largest economy, which looks like it may become the world’s largest economy within the working life of today’s 20-year-olds, is a “no brainer” from a strategic point of view. Granted, China is not a Western democracy, but it is more and more embracing market economy practices, and some economists would argue that you can’t be a little bit pro free market any more than you can be a little bit pregnant…

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