The City Grump, having recently turned 64, has spent north of 30 years in the City of London. He started as a stockbroker's analyst but after some years he decided he was too grumpy to continue with the sell side of things so he moved to the buy side and became a fund manager for the next 20 years, selling his own business in the 1990s. Post the millennium, he found himself in turn chairing a stockbroker, a financial PR company, and an Exchange. He still keeps his hand in, chairing a brace of VCTs and investing personally in startups.
The much trumpeted university student fees and loans concoction is bringing on a scandal of biblical proportions. It embraces fraudulent government accounting, a debased admissions system and an army of disillusioned and over indebted graduates. The good news is the City Grump has a modest proposal.
Prime minister Theresa May has said we have no choice but to protect our EU facing trade from destruction other than to go along with continuing to be a rule taker from the Brussels superstructure. This is grade 1 nonsense, says Real Business columnist The City Grump.
Being a lifelong Conservative voter I naturally wanted to give prime minister Theresa May the benefit of the doubt. Sadly she has become a figure of derision both at home and abroad. The description of her as naturally robotic, hence “The Maybot”, is all too appropriate.
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David “two brains” Willetts and his doughty team mates at something with Orwellian title of The Intergenerational Commission has spent two years coming to blindingly obvious conclusions.
It’s been a long time coming but finally reality is catching up with the “experts” who have been insisting that pension fund managers find the money to stuff their portfolios with more and more bonds to address so-called actuarial deficits.
At a bloated 1.7m paragraphs long, the EU’s new MiFID II regulation is is a breathtakingly inept response to the international financial crash of 2008.
The bibliophile and author, Anatole France, once said: “It is well for the heart to be naïve and the mind not to be.” Britain in 2017 has seen far too many examples economic naivety – the heart ruling the head.
In the firmament of Brexit debate emerges an article by Haakon Overli, founding partner of Dawn Venture Capital, published in the Sunday Telegraph. It argues that the use of blockchain can and should be the bedrock for the post-Brexit environment.
Julius Caesar was an early adopter (“I came, I saw, I conquered”), Napoleon Bonaparte took up the mantel, Benito Mussolini fancied himself as such and Adolf Hitler came within an ace of succeeding. Now we have Jean-Claude Juncker.
The eye popping outturn of the general election combined with subsequent events I am sure makes most of us despair of our political classes. What is going on in Britain today and what can be done?
One of the key tenets of the liberal establishment, and no doubt we shall be fed much more of this in the current election campaign, is cheap labour is essential for the smooth functioning of the UK and other advanced economies. They are oh so wrong.
Ex-chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne has besmirched his former title, The City Grump explained in his latest column.
