The original Red Knight idea, that a bunch of well-heeled Man Utd supporters would club together to buy out the club, looks more-or-less dead. I’ve spoken to a number of the potential investors and they all say the same thing: they can’t see how to do it without paying more than...

The interest rate at which banks lend to each other in dollars, the famous BBA three-month dollar LIBOR rate, has been creeping up day after inexorable day since the end of February. The cumulative impact has been a doubling of that rate during those 90 odd days, to more than 0.5 per cent...

Business leaders have been arguing passionately that the public sector needs to become more efficient. You’ll recall that the equivalent of a plane-load of them publicly backed the Tories’ general election campaign to make additional savings in public expenditure this year –...

The two main areas of cuts in the Business Department, to be announced later today, will be universities and industrial intervention. I am expecting that funding for universities will be cut by around 3%. And I also hear that there will be deep reductions in the budgets of the Regional...

Financial reform in the UK was always going to be conditioned by whatever reforms are enacted in the US. And as of last night, we now have a clearer – if not yet definitive – view of how Congress is planning to shake up Wall Street. The important point is that the Senate has...

The coalition’s programme for government will not please all businesses and business people. There is a surprising amount of detailed policy to promote equality, for example, which will give the willies to some of the more traditional Tory-supporting corporate grandees. So, for example,...