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.

How the online media works...

The Times gets an exclusive story and publishes it on its new "paid-for" website, no doubt expecting to pick up some additional revenue via new subscribers paying to read their scoop.
The Guardian follows the Times's tale and (unusually) leaves the second hand post on the front page of their website all day - purely in an effort to take some of the Times's traffic from Google searches and stop new subscribers.

(Yet) another Kleinkman inclusive...

"The board of BP is considering announcing as soon as next week that Tony Hayward, its embattled chief executive, is to step down, I have learned." Mark Kleinman, Sky News Blog, Friday July 23.

"As I revealed exclusively on this blog on Friday and discussed on air yesterday (both long before any other media organisation followed the story, despite some dubious claims to the contrary today), Hayward's exit three years after he became BP's boss leaves the company with an opportunity to rebuild its future." Mark Kleinman, Sky News Blog, Sunday July 25.

"Tony Hayward is to step down as BP’s chief executive within the next ten weeks as the company seeks to draw a line under its disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. " The Times, Wednesday July 21.

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!"

Rich List here?

What do the cryptic ads running in the Times (below) - featuring images of two Lord Sugars plus four Roman Abramoviches plus two Bernie Ecclestones equalling one Bill Gates - all mean? Could the Sunday Times Rich List be imminent?

Kleinman finds the Times are a changing

I can exclusively reveal, in this exclusive dispatch, which I am writing exclusively for SlackBelly, that the Times is to end the weekly column penned by Mark Kleinman, Sky News' City Editor. Did I mention that I'd revealed this exclusively?

Pedants' corner...

Sometimes hacks are so certain they know something, they don't even bother to check it.
Today The Times and The Telegraph both tip their bowlers to Rolling Stone magazine, referring to Goldman Sachs as being a "giant vampire squid".
Just one problem. The actual words used in the famous piece by Matt Taibbi were: "great vampire squid".

It's a small matter, admittedly, but I happen to notice these things. Taibbi's full (entirely fair) line on the investment bank, actually went: "A great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."
City journalists should find the time to read him. The boy can write.

Question Thiam

A brave move from Prudential, which has allowed chief executive Tidjane Thiam to appear on the website of The Times as part of a feature called "Ask the Boss".
"You can ask the new man from the Pru anything you like" The Times tells its readers, which is a priceless opportunity that I've been waiting weeks to present itself.
My starter for TT: "Are you finding that your sexual allure has increased since you became chief executive?"

Not seeing the Sherwood for the fees

Michael "Woody" Sherwood - vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs group and co-chief exec, Goldman Sachs International - attempts to justify his bank's actions during the financial crisis in an article in The Times today.
“What is common to the investment banks, commercial banks, mortgage banks and insurance companies that failed in the past year is poor management practice,” he muses.
True, but the implication of Woody's line is that those banks that did not fail were somehow spared by good management. Nothing to do with government bail outs, then.

Breakingviews News

I see that The Times has followed my Friday tale about online commentary service, Breakingviews, being on the block (and indeed, deputy business ed, Ian King, has taken it on a bit further).
"Thomson Reuters, the financial information group, is in preliminary talks to buy Breakingviews.com," King reports, before adding: "Breakingviews.com is understood to have appointed Perella Weinberg Partners, the corporate boutique, to advise on a possible transaction".
Quite why (having spent a fortune developing an analysis service of its own) Thomson Reuters would want to buy one, is a question that remains unanswered. However, a small clue may be sitting on the blog of Thomson Reuters boss, Tom Glocer.
On it he lists his favourite online news sources and right behind the obligatory Reuters reference comes (you've guessed it) Breakingviews.

Bowker bows out

The Times made National Express boss Richard Bowker their "Business big shot" yesterday - pointing out the job Bowker has on to pay the Government £1.4 billion to maintain the East Coast Main Line franchise until 2015, before concluding that his "previous experience means that he is better placed than most to try".
D'oh! Not any more. One day later and Bowker had resigned (for "a high-profile job overseas") - while ECML became the latest asset to be swallowed by the UK's sovereign wealth (sic) fund.

Ton-up at The Times

Much embarrassment at the Times, which seems to have bungled its new redundancy programme.
I hear that management assumed that they could get away with whacking some production staff along with a load of casuals - carelessly forgetting that, under employment law, dispatching a casual counts just the same as sacking a full-time member of staff.
So all the whacked casuals nudged the number of lay-offs just above the magic 100 mark – the level which means that the paper now has to go through a lengthy consultation process. D’oh!

In the blue corner ... Martin Waller

Another day, and another SlackBelly yarn is followed up by The Times. This time it is the paper's City Diary which loved yesterday's Donald Trump tale so much, that it simply claimed it for itself.
However, I can only believe that this episiode was an aberration by veteran Times Diarist, Martin Waller - a man known for his sarcastic emails to juniors on rival columns whenever they follow one of his stories.

SlackBelly's (first) tip of the year

Now is the traditional time of year beloved by national newspaper share tipsters when they compete over which one of them can lose more of their readers' cash, by recommending various top investment "tips" and reviewing their performance over the past 12 months.
So I'm delighted to announce that last year's first prize in the "quality" daily category goes to the Times, as its Tempus Ten selection managed to perform even worse than both its competitors and the slumping market, shedding 37.8%.
Meanwhile, those genuises at the Independent made a gallant effort to burden their followers with even more eye-watering losses than their own newspaper's holding company, by recommending a basket of shares that fell 37% (while this year's selection tempts, "Let's be daring this year: after all, how much worse can it get?").
And coming in last position in this section, with a drop of only 25.7%, is the Daily Telegraph's Questor column - that still published news of its losses under the self-congratulatory headline: "Questor share picks beat the FTSE 100".
Quite why these rags feel the need to continue this humiliation is not clear. Apart from the obvious (to most) challenges of trying to deliver absolute returns with a long-only portfolio of a handful of shares which must be held over a 12 month period, there is a more simple flaw to these pisspoor columns: that is, the writers are hacks, not investment experts, who haven't got the slightest clue what they are talking about.
All of which leads us to my first tip of the year: short these columns' 2009 selections immediately (if you haven't done so already).