A small question...

Should Martin Arnold, the FT's private equity correspondent, be writing quite so frequently on Carlyle?

No FT, no bonus comment

I hear that Financial Times hacks have been warned to tone down their coverage of the bonus season by the paper's editor, Lionel Barber. Another bonus for bankers, then.

A Cable Fable

With the good doctor Vince Cable being portrayed as the devil by unquestioning supporters of the City (is he really? The Times City Comment today seems a bit nearer the mark) I'm amused to see how CBI boss, Richard Lambert, is now being billed as the great defender of capitalism.

That would be the same Richard Lambert, who as editor of the Financial Times once wrote an editorial on the eve of the 1992 general election suggesting readers, er, vote Kinnock. How times change.

Red faces at the Pink 'Un

The standard of journalism at the Financial Times continues to drop even faster than newspaper industry circulations.
A fellow Slacker emails to point out that, in his copy, the Pink 'Un's page one trade minister story today refers to Rolls-Royce boss Sir John Rose as heading up the "prestige CARMAKER" [my caps]. The company hasn't done that since 1973! Shoddy.

FT hires its biggest fan

Congratulations to my old friend Mark Kleinman, the City editor of Sky News, for landing a new column at the FT to replace the one he lost at the Times.

Kleinman's scoop-getting qualities are renowned across Fleet Street, but does he rate his new colleagues quite as highly as he and others rate himself?

Tweeting on the Pink 'Un last year, Kleinman mused: "FT just put out a news alert on RBS story I broke on Jeff Randall's show tonight - well done for watching the TV!"

Lax Lex fails to plug the gaps

As BP struggles to plug its leaky well in the Gulf of Mexico, I wonder if the Financial Times's once respected commentary column, Lex, is struggling to fill its own holes left by a recent reshuffle.

In today's paper the column says: "The last time BP cut its dividend, by 50 per cent in 1992, its chief executive resigned shortly afterwards."

Bollocks. Back then, David Simon (later Lord Simon of Highbury) had just been appointed chief exec - and he hung around in that role until 1997. Might Lex actually be thinking of former BP chairman, Bob Horton, who resigned five weeks before the oil group cut the dividend?

Tip for Tett

The FT's Gillian Tett today makes the now common mistake, when she says that clients are "risking the wrath of the giant Vampire Squid".
The actual phrase used by Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs was "great vampire squid". Surely if you steal other people's work, it's best to at least get it right...

Will Dan dare to return?

Spotted, last week, visiting FT Towers ... Guardian business supremo Dan Roberts.
Word has it that the bearded one is seeking to return to the Pink 'Un as an associate editor, on the grounds
that - friends say - "The Guardian is finished".
Roberts - known at the Graun as The 167 owing to his rather tasty salary - has earned a reputation as an, er, hands-off operator at the UK's favourite left-leaning "quality" paper, which means many of its spectacularly lazy business staff may miss him.
Developing...

The damned remain united

Having been brutally ousted by Joe Lewis, Simon Laffin's 59 days as chairman of pubco Mitchells & Butlers look like the corporate equivalent of Brian Clough's 44 day reign at Leeds "Damned" United. And just like Old Big 'Ead, he's not going quietly.

On today's letters page of the Financial Times, Laffin writes: "Shareholder activism is, rightly, being encouraged, but has the regulatory framework yet adjusted to this? An activist shareholder, or group of shareholders, with around 40 per cent of the equity can determine the composition of the board and, as we saw last week, effectively select the chairman."

Clearly, it's still a Laffin matter.

FT brothers scoop their own scoop

Those nice chaps at the Financial Times can only be pushed so far.
Like BA staff, there is a day of action today and a picket (at the FT!). The National Union of Journalists are outside the building, in the snow, and meeting inside to discuss "Unsafe and Unprofessional workloads" says my spy.
The NUJ are also handing out flyers, the highlight of which is this: "Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs boss and the FT's 'Person of the Year' is not the only doing God's work - so are FT journalists inproducing premium products for a discerning audience."
A slight problem is that the NUJ staffers have broken an embargo, because the great vampire squid himself has not actually been named Person of the Year by the FT, yet.
Whoops.

A week is a long time in business...

Oh, the dangers of prophesy. "A year of hard work pays off," was how the Financial Times headlined its interview last week with Russia's former richest man, Oleg Deripaska, ahead of a possible initial public offering in Hong Kong for his aluminium group, Rusal.
Not quite. Hong Kong has now delayed the flotation.

By George! Soros plays both sides

I see that billionaire investor, George Soros, has told the Financial Times that the big profits made by some Wall Street banks are "hidden gifts" from the state, and taxpayer resentment of such companies is "justified".
It's a fair enough point - although he might not be quite the man to make it.
"When I sold sterling short in 1992, the Bank of England was on the other side of my transactions, and I was in effect taking money out of the pockets of British taxpayers," he once gloated. "But if I had tried to take social consequences into account, it would have thrown off my risk-reward calculation, and my profits would have been reduced."
So that's all right then!

Missing pink 'un at the Pink'un

We may be living in financial times, but at the Financial Times staffers are concentrating on more mundane matters.
Yesterday evening, every member of the esteemed organ received a missive entitled "supper" from one sub-editor. It read: "Thanks to whoever took my smoked salmon sandwich from the fridge at the back of the first floor. It was the only food I was likely to have today and, at 22.36, my chances of eating now are as slim as my waist will be tomorrow morning."

Oil and Vinegar mix it in PR world

Reading the Mr Oil and Mr Vinegar restaurant review in FT Alphaville’s members-only Long Room site, a review of Le Caprice catches my eye – in particular, the following passage:

MrO: I’ve always loved it here, since my first visit in 1985 with a very pretty woman who flirted most outrageously with me.

MrV: Did you get anywhere with her?

MrO: No, she was a PR woman and I was a journalist so she was being paid to flirt. I phoned her a couple of weeks later to ask for a date and she didn’t remember who I was.

MrV: That’s PR people for you. Ghastly collection.

Messrs Oil and Vinegar should know. In their real lives the authors are those esteemed City PR people, Piers Pottinger and Damien McCrystal.

Oh FT - no comment

What has the Financial Times' Lex column done to upset blogger Trevor E Brown so?
TEB has started a new feature called Lex Watch which seems to be designed solely to slate the Pink 'Un's back page comment section.
He writes: "The Financial Times Lex column was once thought provoking, informative, and occasionally witty. Now it is lazy warmed-over, regurgitant, boring, with a narcissistic emphasis on style wrapped around flabby content – or am I just having a bad day?"
It seems not - as he's followed it up with a couple more scathing Lex postings, making my obsession with the Telegraph's Jeremy Warner seem positively healthy.

A missable offer

FT editor Lionel Barber says websites will be charging for online content within a year.
SlackBelly is somewhat ahead of the curve and will begin charging immediately*.
Sign up now for just £50 a month to continue receiving a daily (usually) snippet of semi-news/abuse.

*not really.

Nobody going for Gold

Here's Gillian Tett's new book on the credit crunch, Fool's Gold, which you can see is coming under economic pressure itself having been discounted just a couple of month's after the tome's glamorous launch party. Fortunately, Gillian still has her day job as a columnist on the Financial Times where she writes about the potential of the "current wave of extraordinary policy measures unleash[ing] a wild bout of inflation". Not in publishing, luv.

Swine Flu latest

Red alert at the Pink 'Un where an email has been sent to all Financial Times staffers warning that one of their parish has caught the piggy flu.
I hear that Sarah Witt, from the world desk, is the patient and that her hubbie (and fellow FT hack), Pedro Das Gupta, is also "unwell".

Fancy that...

FT, 15 Feb 2009:
King’s faded realm
By Chris Giles
"Mr King’s beloved inflation targeting and the Bank’s sole command of monetary policy appear as much part of the bubble – now burst – as bankers’ bonuses."

FT, Mar 27, 2009:
King back in his castle
By Chris Giles
"Mr King’s authority in the British economic debate has never been higher than it has been this week."

Blackstone finds the best things in life are free

The Financial Times is suing private equity giant Blackstone, claiming the US investment group shared one FT.com account login to avoid paying for multiple users.
Lawyers are predictably poring over lists of stories that Blackstone employees read, and I learn from one of my learned friends that over half the tales were from Alphaville - the pink 'un's award-winning financial blog, access to which is, er, free.