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Business comment
Bill Jamieson: Banks: emerging from the bottom drawer
It’s bottom-drawer rummage time again. Remember those bank shares that made you wince every time you checked them? The ones with 90 per cent falls that dragged down your investment performance, that paid no dividends and were useful only to mitigate capital gains tax liability?
Farming: Owners of sheep-worrying dogs need bitten
Ben was about the poorest sheepdog around, and I can say that from pretty close observation as he was the shepherd’s dog on my father’s farm.
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Comment: Taxing questions for complicit governments
IS YOUR business guilty of “false delocalisation”? That’s the fancy EU jargon for the creative tax avoidance schemes engineered by multinational companies such as Google and Amazon.
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Comment: Centrica’s price promise creates a warm glow
MARKETS regard anything that cuts corporate costs as a reason to send company shares upwards as it means more on the bottom line. Even job cuts get a cheer.
Andrew Arbuckle: Carving up the £1bn SRDP cake is no easy task for minister
YOU would think it was the best job in the world spending £1 billion – but being cabinet secretary and having the next Scottish Rural Development Programme (SRDP) cash to distribute is a veritable minefield.
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Bill Jamieson: Taking a defensive position could be sensible
WHAT is it that stock markets know that the rest of us don’t? Despite a near brush with a third recession, glacial growth performance and signs that the global economy may be slowing, stock markets round the world seem to have thrown caution to the winds.
Week ahead: Lloyds Banking Group and RBS AGMs
LLOYDS Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland directors will be grilled at their AGMs this week on speculation over government plans for a pre-election sell-off of taxpayer stakes.
Comment: Pay–TV price war is ready for kick–off
FORGET Sir Alex Ferguson. The real sports news lies in the impending clash between league champions BSkyB and upstart BT, in the lucrative pay-TV market.
Comment: Parental control helps keep NAB in shape
CLYDESDALE and Yorkshire Banks have returned to profitability in their first trading half after last year’s losses prompted a sharp overhaul of the UK operations of National Australia Bank.
Comment: Let’s raise a glass to Walsh for a job well done
VERY few FTSE 100 chief executives after a 13-year tenure leave a legacy as impressive as Paul Walsh will at spirits giant Diageo this summer.
Bill Jamieson: this is no normal recession
Had anyone suggested in May 2012 that within a year the US stock market would have climbed to record highs and that our own FTSE 100 would have gained almost 20 per cent, their sanity would have been questioned.
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Comment: Is Sid being kept in the dark?
THE idea of a 1980s “Tell Sid”-style re-privatisation of Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group won’t go away, and it is clear it is under serious consideration by the UK government.
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Comment: Chill winds blowing through global economy
IT MAY be spring, and the garden centres groaning with stuff to plant, but the global economy has caught an unexpected chill.
Comment: Taxman’s few crumbs of comfort from Apple
THERE’S a hilarious passage in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities in which bond trader and self-proclaimed “master of the universe” Sherman McCoy tries, and fails, to explain to his daughter what he does for a living.
Comment: How to break even when making a loss
ONE person who will be hoping the surge in Lloyds shares continues is the bank’s chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio.
Comment: Currency concerns require sterling effort
EARLIER this year, the CBI published an excellent paper on the issues that business would like the Scottish Government’s white paper on independence to address. Among them, the first concerned currency.
1 commentPeople: Rugby stars cut dash at Ruffians birthday bash
THE first birthday party of upmarket Edinburgh barber shop and male grooming products brand Ruffians was packed with stylish and sexy people, leaving three members of the business desk feeling like the Top Gear team at the launch of a bicycle co-operative.
Comment: Selling RBS ‘good bank’ would allow it to grow
SHOULD Royal Bank of Scotland be split into a good bank and a bad bank, privatising the bit that makes money? Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, thinks it should.
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Comment: Pension blow awaiting independent Scotland
There remain many questions to be answered in the case of a “yes” vote in 2014. But the one raised by Icas, the professional body for chartered accountants, is a cause for worry for employers both north and south of a more firmly drawn Border.
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Comment: Project Verde leaves Co–op boss a little shirty
PETER Marks, the bluff chief executive of the Co-operative Group, joked last year that in his negotiations with Lloyds’ boss Antonio Horta-Osorio on the Project Verde branches’ sale he had “got the shirt off his back and his cuff-links”. He must have given them back now.
Comment: Tears for Chancellor whose sums don’t add up
AMID the pomp and ceremony of Baroness Thatcher’s funeral last week, comment was made on the tears coursing down the cheek of one George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer.
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Comment: Brussels has scuppered free RBS shares for all
LITTLE has gone smoothly with Royal Bank of Scotland since its crash, and it looks like even a discounted or free public share issue when the bank returns to the private sector won’t escape that shadow.
Bill Jamieson: Who will audit the auditors?
IN THE wake of the global banking crisis and the corporate failures and scandals of recent years, accountants have found themselves directly in the firing line.
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Weather for Edinburgh
Monday 20 May 2013
Today
Thunderstorm
Temperature: 8 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
Wind direction: South
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 6 C to 16 C
Wind Speed: 13 mph
Wind direction: North west
