Welcome to Peston’s Picks - the home of my reports and analysis of the issues in business that matter to us all
08:00 UK time, Tuesday, 15 January 2013
Here are two big questions about the collapse into administration of HMV.
Will it go the way of Jessops and Comet? Will all 239 stores be closed, with the loss of all 4,000 jobs?
13:22 UK time, Monday, 14 January 2013
There seems to be a prevailing view that it is little short of scandalous that Goldman Sachs in the UK may defer the handing over of shares to its executives, so that they would be liable to next year's income tax rate of 45% on the payments rather than this year's 50% (see this morning's FT for more on this).
Given the size of Goldman's historic bonus pools, the value of these shares would certainly run to tens of millions of pounds, and probably to hundreds of millions of pounds, so the tax saving would not be trivial - perhaps double digit millions of pounds (Goldman won't confirm the quantum).
12:38 UK time, Thursday, 10 January 2013
Royal Bank of Scotland is in the last delicate phase of negotiations with regulators in the UK and US on the fines to be paid for its Libor transgressions and other necessary remediation, including a possible senior resignation.
What is clear is that UK and US fines will run to several hundred million pounds, or more than the £290m extracted from Barclays.
21:36 UK time, Wednesday, 9 January 2013
Marks and Spencer did something unusual this evening at ten to eight, which is put out its trading statement almost 12 hours earlier than scheduled.
The reason is there had been a leak to Sky News of a couple of the figures, which showed that - as expected - sales of clothes and general merchandise have been poor in the last three months of the year, which includes the important Christmas period.
09:22 UK time, Wednesday, 9 January 2013
The detail of Sainsbury's better-than-average trading performance for the 14 weeks to 5 January confirm the big trends in retailing and consumer spending.
Shoppers are trying to spend less and increase saving (where they can, in an era where disposable incomes remain under relentless pressure).
22:03 UK time, Tuesday, 8 January 2013
The charges against eight individuals brought by Thames Valley Police, following a probe into corruption originating from a Reading branch of HBOS, is another devastating blow to the reputation of what was once among the UK's most admired banks - and is now owned by Lloyds following its collapse in 2008.
For years there were allegations - which were reported under privilege in the House of Commons as long ago as June 2009 - that a banker at HBOS's so-called high risk lending unit in Reading was in cahoots with a consultancy called Quayside, to strip assets from financially troubled customers of the bank.
08:59 UK time, Tuesday, 8 January 2013
Here is a bit of hocus-pocus courtesy of Jim O'Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
In his recent letter to investors he talks about the "great Almanac rule" that "if the US market is net positive after the first five days of trading [in a new year], with something like an 85% success rate since 1950 the market is not only up for the year but there is a gain of around 14% on average".
18:31 UK time, Sunday, 6 January 2013
Financial regulators and central bank governors from the world's biggest economies have made history by agreeing rules on the minimum quantities of cash and liquid or sellable assets that all banks must hold. It is an attempt to make banks less vulnerable to the kind of runs that shattered Northern Rock and Lehman Bros.
There is an oddity at the heart of today's historic agreement by the oversight body of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which for the first time will impose new minimum requirements for the amount of cash and liquid assets that banks all over the world will have to hold.
15:31 UK time, Wednesday, 19 December 2012
The Treasury offered Mark Carney a £250,000 annual accommodation allowance, on top of his £624,000 salary and cash in lieu of pension, because it did not see why his lifestyle should suffer from a move to London.
Currently governor of the Bank of Canada, Mr Carney, his English wife and four children live in a large family house a short distance from his office in Ottawa.
07:56 UK time, Wednesday, 19 December 2012
Even by the standards of recent revelations of wrongdoing at the world's biggest banks, the disclosures of how UBS tried to systematically manipulate the important Libor interest rate benchmarks will be seen as pretty hair-raising.
UBS has been punished by regulators in the US, UK and its home country of Switzerland. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) investigation catalogued at least 2,000 documented requests for inappropriate Libor submissions and countless verbal ones. The British regulator describes the misconduct as "extensive and widespread" and says at least 45 UBS bankers knew what was going on.
13:31 UK time, Tuesday, 18 December 2012
I have one or two thoughts about whether the Bank of England should adopt a target other than pure inflation - although the definitive piece on this debate initiated by the governor-elect of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, is here, by my colleague Stephanie Flanders.
To start with probably the least important aspect of all this, I am surprised by how little emotion has been sparked by Mr Carney's remarks, that there might be a case for replacing narrow inflation as a target with nominal GDP target, or the cash value of annual economic output.
11:10 UK time, Monday, 17 December 2012
How could and should the justice system deal with miscreant banks when there are likely to be "collateral consequences" for the innocent - including you and me - from the more severe punishments?
Tomorrow there should be another chance to assess the practice of punishing banks that do wrong, while trying to spare innocent customers and bystanders, when the fines and sanctions against the enormous Swiss bank UBS for its role in the Libor-rigging scandal may well be confirmed and explained.
09:26 UK time, Thursday, 13 December 2012
At about 04:45 Brussels time this morning, European Union finance ministers made a bit of EU history.
Their agreement to give the European Central Bank the power to supervise the eurozone's bigger banks sounds horribly technical and dull. But it matters, in helping the eurozone to move a little further away from the cliff edge, while perhaps mapping a future for the UK in an EU increasingly dominated by currency union members acting as a unified bloc.
10:03 UK time, Wednesday, 12 December 2012
There are a number of complementary explanations for why economic recovery in Europe since the crash of 2007/8 has been so much weaker than was expected by governments - such as the necessary and inevitable shrinkage of the banking sector and the crisis in the eurozone.
But one of the most important causes, highlighted in a new report by McKinsey, is that there has been what it calls "an unprecedented weakness in private investment".
09:27 UK time, Tuesday, 11 December 2012
The price in today's money of past sinning by the UK's biggest international banks is becoming bigger and bigger.
HSBC is paying $1.9bn (£1.2bn) in fines and forfeitures to assorted federal and state authorities for its inadequate controls against money transfers by criminals, terrorists and countries that are subject to sanctions (such as Iran).
08:25 UK time, Monday, 10 December 2012
US and British regulators have agreed a common approach to limiting the damage for customers and taxpayers that is caused when a giant bank gets into difficulties.
The Bank of England and America's Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have issued a joint paper which is in essence an action plan for making the biggest banks - such as the UK's Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays, and Citigroup and JP Morgan in the US - safer.
18:50 UK time, Saturday, 8 December 2012
Robert added analysis to:
The tax choices faced by companies
09:47 UK time, Friday, 7 December 2012
There are two lines of argument used by companies that are most aggressive in reducing their liability to UK corporation tax.
The first one is that they have a "fiduciary" duty to their shareholders (which broadly means that they can be sued or sacked by their shareholders if they wilfully reduce reported profits).
08:50 UK time, Thursday, 6 December 2012
Will the UK lose its AAA and does it matter?
The answer to the first question is "probably" - although the timing is uncertain.
13:47 UK time, Wednesday, 5 December 2012
The two big challenges for George Osborne today were to do something to wake the UK economy from the torpor that has afflicted it since 2008, while also persuading investors of the world that lending to the government remains a prudent thing to do.
How has he set about it?
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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