Philip Delves-Broughton

Today

3 Sep 2020
Philip Delves-Broughton

As New Yorkers flee, the suburbs are under siege

New York ‘Land of the Flee’, screamed the New York Post front page this week. Moving vans are lining up in Manhattan. Residents have had enough. It had been ‘another bloody weekend in Gotham’ with 21 people shot, and a rising wave of non-gun violence. At 11 a.m. on Saturday, a man leapt on top of a young woman on a subway platform in midtown and began grinding against her until a group of bystanders forced him to stop. You can watch the whole thing on video and decide never to take public transport again. Living in New York has always felt like walking on a very narrow beam. The chasms on either side are the thrill of it. They create extremes of excitement, anxiety, achievement and despair. But many are now deciding: to hell with the city that never sleeps.

As New Yorkers flee, the suburbs are under siege

Thursday

8 Oct 2015
Philip Delves-Broughton

Why Carly Fiorina (probably) can’t save the Republicans

The Republican party is showing all the attention span of a hyperactive toddler this primary season, moving from one shiny toy to the next. Donald Trump still dominates the nursery, like some giant plastic fire engine. But the pieces are starting to look careworn and the battery is going on the siren. The former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, now tied with Trump in some polls, is the teddy bear dragged around the playground a few times and now slumped in a corner. Fresh out of the box though is Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett Packard, gleaming amidst the gaggle of tired rivals. At the most recent Republican debate, Fiorina wore what seemed from podium height upwards to be an electric-blue wetsuit.

Why Carly Fiorina (probably) can’t save the Republicans

Thursday

6 Aug 2015
Philip Delves-Broughton

How Hillary can win it – for the Republicans

 New York [audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/howtofixtherefugeecrisis/media.mp3" title="Philip Delves Broughton and Freddy Gray discuss how Hillary can swing it for the Republicans" startat=847] Listen [/audioplayer]Remember the fizz around Gordon Brown’s election campaign in 2010? The excitement he brought to the trail? The eerily intimate connection with the electorate? No, nor can I. But conjure up what you can and mix it with the thrill of a hot afternoon locked in a community centre discussing renovations to the ping-pong room and you’ll have a sense of the vibe around Hillary Clinton’s latest campaign for president. The American media is bored of her and the polls show her support slipping, even against a Republican field nuked by the presence of Donald Trump.

How Hillary can win it – for the Republicans

Thursday

2 Jul 2015
Philip Delves-Broughton

The wrong man

For the final three years of his 18-year career at Goldman Sachs, Jim O’Neill, the Treasury’s new commercial secretary with responsibility for developing the Northern Powerhouse, served as chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, the company’s least-regarded and most bothersome unit. While two younger executives ran the business, O’Neill was dispatched to faraway conferences to bore audiences of docile suits with his views on whether Nigeria or Malaysia offered a better investment opportunity. When finally in early 2013 he resigned his sinecure, he was not replaced and his title was mothballed. Since then, he has been all but marching up and down Whitehall wearing a sandwich board pleading for a government job.

The wrong man

Thursday

4 Jun 2015
Philip Delves-Broughton

Running wild | 4 June 2015

 New York It takes a strange bird to run for the White House. To think you’re worth all the fund-raising, the protection, the applause, the haters, the heel-clicking Marines. But with a mere 18 months till the next election, the field is taking shape: Hillary Clinton, still pitching herself as the nation’s benevolent grandma even after it emerged that she and her husband had in the past year raked in $25 million in speaking fees; Jeb Bush, 30 pounds lighter on his ‘paleo’ diet, trying to prove he’s not the Pete Best of the Bush family; and tucked in behind, various curiosities from the Senate (Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul) and governors’ mansions (Chris Christie of New Jersey), all hoping they can channel some mysterious electoral force.

Running wild | 4 June 2015

Thursday

26 Mar 2015
Philip Delves-Broughton

That’s not a ‘sharing economy’: that’s an invitation to sell your whole life

Technology businesses have a genius for inflicting indignities on us and spinning them as virtues. When they don’t want to respect copyright, they talk about the ‘democratisation of content’. When they want to truffle through our contact lists and browsing histories, they talk about ‘openness’ and ‘personalisation’. A hundred years ago, when a widow had to take in lodgers to pay the bills, it was called misfortune. Today, when an underemployed photographer has to rent out a room in his house or turn his car into a taxi, it’s called the ‘sharing economy’. First Google took his job. Now Airbnb wants his house. Next they’ll be after his pets. In fact, they already are. Businesses are now emerging which offer you the chance to turn those hairy, underutilised masses snoring on the kitchen floor into cold hard cash.

That’s not a ‘sharing economy’: that’s an invitation to sell your whole life

Thursday

20 Nov 2014
Philip Delves-Broughton

How to fight Europe’s demons of deflation

Deflation terrifies economists because once it starts, they have no idea what to do about it. When demand in an economy shrinks, companies cut jobs, and with fewer employed demand shrinks even more. The deflationary spiral is self-reinforcing. Central banks can cut interest rates to near zero and slosh money around like drunken lottery winners, but once hope flickers and dies, there is nothing they can do to persuade anyone to invest in the economy. Deflation took hold in Japan in the early 1990s and despite the government straining every sinew, its economy is still ailing 20 years on. Europe is right, then, to be in a panic. Inflation across the eurozone is just 0.4 per cent and over the past year eight of its economies, including Greece, Hungary, Sweden and Poland, have recorded annualised rates of negative inflation, falls in wages and prices of a kind Britain has not seen since 1960.

How to fight Europe’s demons of deflation

Thursday

20 Mar 2014
Philip Delves-Broughton

How to tell a tech bubble from a tech revolution

There are two major schools of technology investing. The first believes that all investments these days are fundamentally technology investments. Every big company relies to a greater or lesser degree on the innovations and efficiencies of technology to replace the high costs and laggardly habits of human beings. The faster they do this, the higher their returns. The second school covets the pop and fizz of the new. It rejects the tedium of earnings-based valuations in favour of the helium of potential. It piles into the latest new share offerings and regards Twitter as the future of mobile advertising, not a punchline. One school feels like traditional, copper-bottomed investing, the other like a long night in Las Vegas.

How to tell a tech bubble from a tech revolution

Thursday

20 Feb 2014
Philip Delves-Broughton

The American economy vs gravity

The American economy always feels better when the Super Bowl is on. Ads for trucks and beer fill the airwaves. It’s steak and cigar season for the corporate bigwigs, not a time for the calorie conscious. For a few days, they can forget about foreign labour and cratering emerging markets and wallow in the fantasy that America is still about men in faded jeans and worn baseball caps, doing practical things with their hands. Now the pigskin has been locked away until autumn, however, one can take a colder look at the behemoth. No doubt, it has been a fine few years to be rich in America. The crash of 2008 turned out to be an epic buying opportunity, and you didn’t even have to use your own money. The Federal Reserve was offering its own, via a $800 billion quantitative easing programme, in the name of stimulus.

The American economy vs gravity

Tuesday

8 Oct 2013
Philip Delves-Broughton

America is not facing a debt crisis. Why pretend otherwise?

The maths of America’s financial problems are fairly simple. Every year the federal government spends more than it brings in so must borrow to fill the gap. This is fine when you’re young and healthy, with great prospects and you are borrowing to invest. But one day your lenders look at you and realise you’re not young and growing any more. You’re middle-aged and knackered. You are borrowing simply to spend and time is running out for you to pay back your debts. It’s an ugly moment for anyone, especially the most powerful country in the world. There are economists like Paul Krugman who argue that America is not like a household or a person. It can borrow and invest in ways unique to sovereign powers. Countries do not simply age and die.

America is not facing a debt crisis. Why pretend otherwise?

Thursday

29 Aug 2013
Philip Delves-Broughton

The future made Thiel

Turn right along the American political spectrum and you find all kinds of curious species. First there are country club Republicans bemoaning the loss of their party to extremists. Then come Evangelical Christians, trying to reconcile themselves to voting for a Mormon. Further along, you find the Tea Party, crowing over their improbable rise and Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate. Then somewhere out there past Ron Paul, the Texan libertarian, amongst the witchy thickets of Ayn Rand and techno-futurism, you will find Peter Thiel, billionaire technology investor, Christian, gay, and a man so committed to the idea of personal freedom that he is investing in ‘seasteads’, self-governing communities built on floating rigs out at sea, beyond the reach of any nation.

The future made Thiel

Thursday

4 Jul 2013
Philip Delves-Broughton

Watch out France: Nicolas Sarkozy is back, and he wants revenge

Nicolas Sarkozy is angry — a ‘caged lion’, one of his closest friends told Le Monde last week. He is angry about the state of France, the state of his party, his perceived persecution by the courts, but perhaps most of all about the fact that he isn’t in the Élysée Palace to clean the mess up. If the French were to clamour for his return, he is reported to have told a Goldman Sachs conference in London this month, he would come back ‘for duty’s sake’. But Sarkozy is no Cincinnatus. He would not be treading wearily back from his plough to assume office for the good of France. He would be more like Obelix spying a wild boar. He would smack his lips and bear down greedily. Where another might see duty or burden, Sarkozy would see only -opportunity.

Watch out France: Nicolas Sarkozy is back, and he wants revenge

Thursday

8 Nov 2012
Philip Delves-Broughton

Hope? Yes. Change? No

What a long and nasty campaign that was. It is hard to imagine that a political race of such magnitude could be so intellectually and emotionally bunged-up. But it’s over, and we can now ask ourselves what the point was of President Obama clubbing his way to another four years of access to the White House gym. What now? Because even after so many months of campaigning, it’s not entirely clear. Certainly not the way it was in 2008, when voters swooned over his promise of hope and change. Then, Obama promised light after the darkness of the Bush-Cheney years. He would bring peace and harmony, end wars and reconcile the partisans of Washington. This time, his promises were more grounded: competence, experience and more of his statist approach to managing the economy.

Hope? Yes. Change? No

Saturday

4 Aug 2012
Philip Delves-Broughton

The despair bubble

Economists, we should all have learned by now, are mostly quacks. They practise neither a science nor an art but a bad game of darts. Boozed up on shoddy theory and meaningless statistics, they wobble to the oche of public life, hurl an arrow at the backboard, then blame the flight, the lighting, anything but their own incompetence, when it falls to the floor. So why listen? Why bother with their endless fainting fits over the slightest flicker in the numbers? When they try to tally the Office of National Statistics’ claim that the British economy shrank by 0.7 per cent in the three months to June with the CBI’s manufacturing survey, which shows cautious optimism, or the obvious advantages of shrinking the deficit with the effect of the eurozone crisis on exports, they are quickly lost in a macroeconomic fog.

The despair bubble

Saturday

7 Jan 2012
Philip Delves-Broughton

Bankers or bust

Last year a single sector of British industry was responsible for generating 12 per cent of government tax receipts, with just 4 per cent of the workforce. You would think the government would be grateful to these hyper-productive worker bees, at a time when it needs every penny of tax. Solicitous even, as it is with ‘clean tech’ firms and Silicon Roundabout start-ups, which deliver nothing close to this kind of tax revenue. Not a chance. Because the sector is financial services, and three years after the financial world imploded — with Britain still plodding its way through the valley of economic death — banker bashing is still considered political gold.Even when giving his new year’s message, David Cameron was careful to include his now customary swipe at the ‘few at the top’ who ‘get rewards that seem to have nothing to do with the risks they take or the effort they put in’.

Saturday

22 Oct 2011
Philip Delves-Broughton

Diary - 22 October 2011

I arrived at the Occupy Wall Street protests on Monday morning, their one month anniversary, at 7 a.m. raring to go. That’s when the subway stations of Lower Manhattan are spewing out their banking spawn, when the streets are full of capitalist pillagers swarming off to suck what blood is left in the western economies. I was looking forward to a confrontation, some fist-shaking, at least some graphic shouting and argy-bargy. But at Zuccotti Park, I found everyone huddled beneath blue tarpaulin, fast asleep. Four weeks in, the radicals are exhausted. Surrounding the park, half the size of a football pitch and dotted with honey locust trees, stood groups of policemen, television vans and food carts all waiting for the protestors to get up.

Saturday

10 Sep 2011
Philip Delves-Broughton

A rich man for all seasons

Multibillionaire Warren Buffett may sound cuddly, but he’s talking from both sides of his mouthAugust was a typical month for Warren Buffett, America’s second richest man. While the leisure classes lolled, he called for higher tax rates for the rich. If America had a debt problem, he wrote in the New York Times, it was high time the rich paid a greater share of their earnings to the government. Then, two weeks later, he sank his fangs into the fleshy rump of Bank of America, one of the bailed-out giants still staggering three years since the start of the financial crisis. Buffett had been circling Bank of America for a while, hoping that its problems would force it into his arms. It was simply a question of when not if they would have to take his money.

A rich man for all seasons

Saturday

3 Sep 2011
Philip Delves-Broughton

Indolence and experience

 School holidays for the children of the affluent used to be about doing nothing in particular. Tagging along to a sun-baked villa, perhaps, or slouching around Verbier in search of familiar Harrys and Rosies. For the unlucky facing an exam year, there might be a week or two of cramming. But otherwise, these were the weeks of indolence and precious irresponsibility, the time to charge the batteries for the looming decades of early mornings in the City.Not any more. The battle for jobs is starting ever earlier, creeping grimly into these teenage years in the form of the ‘internship’. This is no summer job in a pub or a shop to make a bit of money, but a full-blown, put on a suit and go and lurk around adults professional try-out.

Saturday

9 Jul 2011
Philip Delves-Broughton

Degrees of optimism

The speeches given to new graduates at American universities are a distinct literary form – and a measure of national moodTo understand what is going on in America’s head, it is worth tuning in to the early summer hum of commencement addresses. These secular sermons, delivered by politicians, businesspeople, entertainers and other assorted worthies to those graduating from university, are a unique literary form which provides an excellent measure of the national mood. They offer the latest riffs on America’s great national themes, on ambition, equality, perseverance and optimism. In good times, they are giddy; in bad times, sober. In the muddled middle, where we find ourselves now, they are as confused as the various market indicators — one day as glum as Harold Camping, the Californian preacher who predicted the world would end this past May, the next as high as an early-stage investor in Facebook.

Saturday

9 Apr 2011
Philip Delves-Broughton

Bubble 2.0

There is nothing more maddening to an old-school investor than a bubble. And especially a bubble in which young people are getting outrageously rich. But here we are, 11 years after the last technology bubble popped, in the midst of another of those exuberant moments. Facebook valued at $75 billion. Groupon, a three year old coupon business, at $25 billion. College dropouts with a knack for programming and a devilish knowledge of our online behaviours are suddenly worth more than a roomful of Goldman Sachs partners.The valuations are crazy, the value investors splutter. There are real businesses with real earnings worth nothing like these shooting stars. It’s immoral! Well, maybe. The most dangerous thought in any bubble is ‘this time it’s different’.

Bubble 2.0

Saturday

5 Mar 2011
Philip Delves-Broughton

Mormons on the march

In any discussion of Mormons, it’s worth getting the gags out of the way first. There’s the chafing underwear they must wear to deter them from temptation, which looks like a cilice by Fruit of the Loom. There’s polygamy, which though rejected by the Mormon church in 1890, is still practised by a few perverted loons in remote corners of Utah and Colorado, who construct architecturally fascinating networks of trailers to house their multiple families. There’s Joseph Smith, who founded the Mormon Church after experiencing a vision in western New York State. The notion that God would choose to appear here seems hilarious to many who happily accept He would show himself in south-west France or the Levant. Smith spent his life in constant battle with his creditors, his neighbours and the government as he led his followers across America in search of a place where they could build their new Jerusalem.

Mormons on the march

Saturday

24 Jul 2010
Philip Delves-Broughton

Rotten Apple

There is a point in the life of all companies where they go from being truth machines to lie machines. The honesty necessary to succeed when times are difficult, either as a start-up or as a firm fighting off disaster, becomes a tendency to distortion when the cash is flowing freely and the profits seemingly endless. Apple may not quite be there yet. But the firm regarded as the benchmark for elegant, popular technology is fast becoming one of the bad guys, a byword for the moral failings of global capitalism. While its profits soar, minor blips, like the recent news that the latest iPhone has a dodgy antenna, can be smoothed over. Last week, all it took was a presentation by its revered CEO Steve Jobs, and consumers were reassured.

Rotten Apple

Saturday

29 May 2010
Philip Delves-Broughton

Not so slick, Mr President

Philip Delves Broughton says that Barack Obama has not dealt well with the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico — and his party will pay at the congressional elections in NovemberI suppose £260 million isn’t all that much in the scheme of things. Not when you are used to dealing in billions and trillions. Yet at the very moment when the entire Western world is hitching in its belt, slashing public spending and preaching austerity, work is to begin on the most extensive renovations at the White House in 60 years. New heating, cooling, electrical and fire alarm systems will be installed over four years. For £260 million, there must be a few contractors in Washington howling up their sleeves. Not to mention a Chinese creditor somewhere shaking his wizened head at the way America keeps spending what it doesn’t have.

Not so slick, Mr President

Saturday

24 Apr 2010
Philip Delves-Broughton

Is the suit against Goldman Sachs a fraud?

The official investigation into the firm’s activities is pointless, says Philip Delves Broughton. Governments are too weak to punish the financial giantI loathe Goldman Sachs as much as the next man. It’s part jealousy at the firm’s grip on the world’s treasure. Part horror at the parade of bumptious baldies who run the firm and snigger, as the CEO Lloyd Blankfein did to the Sunday Times, that they are doing ‘God’s work’. The only way to rationalise this was to recall Dorothy Parker’s quip that you can tell what God thinks of money by considering the people he gives it to. Write a cross word about Goldman, and you can be sure to receive an email rocket from the firm’s European PR man, surname Kafka. Goldman is more a succubus than a haven of sunshine, daffodils and smiling babies.

Is the suit against Goldman Sachs a fraud?

Saturday

13 Sep 2003
Philip Delves-Broughton

Chirac and the son of Nippon

ParisWithin the next few months, Jacques Chirac’s illegitimate son will turn 18 and the French press will face a dilemma. Do they celebrate his majority on the front page of Paris Match? Or do they keep it as hush-hush as they have in the past out of courtesy, respect for a statesman’s private life and fear? I talk of Chirac’s illegitimate son as if he were a fact, but all I have to go on is ever more brazen Parisian gossip which says that we are in 1994 all over again, counting down to when Paris Match put Mazarine Pingeot on its front cover and the world found out that Fran’ois Mitterrand had a 19-year-old daughter who lived with his long-standing mistress in a government flat on the Left Bank. The latest to edge towards unmasking Chirac’s supposed second family is Guy Birenbaum, a prominent literary editor and author of Our Insider Trading, a book published last week which blames Paris’s political, media and financial elite for preserving a culture of secrecy.

Saturday

19 Jul 2003
Philip Delves-Broughton

Elf warning

Paris During the past ten years, 34 out of the 128 Cabinet ministers to have served in the French government have been indicted, mostly for financial crimes. President Chirac himself has had to rig up an immunity law to protect him from charges that he treated his previous job, as mayor of Paris, as a cash-till to enrich himself, his party and his supporters. Among Western leaders, only Silvio Berlusconi has a murkier legal past. So when a French judge decides to talk about corruption, it should be no surprise that she is pilloried by Chirac’s heavies in the establishment. Eva Joly, if you believe the macho Chirac loyalists, is nothing but a vain old widow who is ready to bend the truth and takes bribes to promote herself.

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