Ian King



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Career: The Times: Business & City Editor, 2011-

Current position/role: Business and City editor


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Articles: 2013
Selected articles
 * Realpolitik needs hard currency decisions - Currency wars, like real wars, are hard to stop once started - 24th January
 * Private-public dilemma that may not compute - During the first five years of its life as a public company, Dell grew its revenues at an annualised rate of 66 per cent. However, during the most recent five years, revenues have actually fallen as consumers have switched away from personal computers towards tablets - 15th January
 * ONS decision defies logic - The Retail Price Index, as it stands, has a bias towards exaggerating the true level of inflation. It is a bias that more enlightened countries, such as Canada, corrected more than 30 years ago - 12th January
 * What goes up must come down, or not - If the cover price of The Times was to rise from £1 to £1.20 in line with its competitors, most people would say, correctly, that this was contributing to higher inflation
 * Fiscal drift is real danger - Enjoy the rally while it lasts. A modest rise was due, as any deal to stave off the fiscal cliff was better than no deal, but yesterday’s euphoria was misplaced - 4th January



Articles: 2012
Selected articles
 * Truce is needed for big deals to flow again - Anyone seeking evidence of how confidence has drained from Britain’s chief executives during the past 12 months need only turn to an analysis that was published yesterday by Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer - 21st December
 * The risks of switching targets may be too great - Replacing the Bank of England’s inflation target with a nominal GDP target has, for years, been a topic for economics geeks only - 14th December
 * What 99% of us really should worry about - George Osborne is with the 99 per cent. Yes, really. One of the Chancellor’s more intriguing revelations yesterday was that 99 per cent of people save less than £40,000 in their pension scheme annually - 7th December
 * The endgame remains the same for Greece - It would be tempting to assume that yesterday’s successful eurozone sovereign debt auctions were a direct result of the latest bailout deal for Greece. Tempting, but wrong - 29th November
 * New rules mean the joke is on the consumer - The Government’s proposal to restrict each energy supplier to only four tariffs — one of which, incredibly. would be any “white label” service provided to a third party — will drive competition away, not enhance it - 21st November
 * The dilemma facing the Bank - It is easy to forget now, as he nears the end of his time as Governor of the Bank of England, but Sir Mervyn King has been a trail-blazer - 16th November
 * No change but then all change at the Fed? - Angela Merkel may soon have a rival in those “world’s most powerful woman” lists regularly trotted out - 7th November
 * Rushing out a result is not the right answer - Tomorrow should see confirmation that, during the third quarter, Britain pulled out of recession - 24th October
 * Spain has incentive to call Bank’s bluff - Over to you, Mr Rajoy. The European Central Bank delivered everything the markets hoped for yesterday and was rewarded with a rally in risk assets - 6th September
 * Fuelling suspicion is no more than snake oil - Motorists have long suspected they are being ripped off on fuel prices and this investigation looks specifically designed to pander to that distrust - 6th September
 * New players who know the game - Vince Cable is arguably the Business Secretary least popular with business people since the hectoring Patricia Hewitt or the meddling Stephen Byers - 5th September
 * President Obama could look to Russia for true love - With the economy set to dominate the presidential election, Barack Obama could use one or two captains of industry talking up US growth prospects, even though few seem likely to do so at this week’s Democratic convention - 4th September
 * Parting shot fails to stand close scrutiny - David Blanchflower had better look to his laurels. With one week left as a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, Adam Posen looks to be preparing a pitch to become that body’s most outspoken ex-member - 29th August
 * Measured response puts spotlight on New York - If you are going to accuse a bank of aiding as vile a regime as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s, you need to be sure of your facts - 9th August
 * Life’s not great, but it’s better than the figures say - The number of jobs being created — 181,000 in the three months to the end of May — and the rise in tax revenues suggests the underlying picture is healthier - 26th July
 * Spain’s gamble relies on buying some time - 24th July
 * Statistics offer a mixed picture in Britain - Britain was still in recession in the second quarter of the year — at least, that is what official statistics should confirm tomorrow. Yet there is cause to doubt this - 24th July
 * More jobs, but same questions remain - Another robust set of jobs data again highlights a conundrum raised in these pages several times in recent months — how can an economy that is supposedly flatlining be creating so many jobs? - 19th July
 * Investors count the cost of rich rewards - Bankers raging at European Parliament proposals to cap bonuses at 100 per cent of salary would appear to have an unlikely ally. Michel Barnier... - 18th July (see: Time to let investors decide: Brussels moves on bonuses and The bailout era is over - Michel Barnier: Viewpoint, 6th June)
 * Buckles must wait to see if he is out of jail - Since it was formed from the merger of Denmark’s Group 4 Falck and Britain’s Securicor, back in 2004, G4S has provided a total shareholder return of 361 per cent - 17th July
 * Rescue mission has a health warning - In A Rake’s Progress, the key protagonist ends up in a lunatic asylum. Things are not that bad at Barclays but it is far from clear why Sir Michael Rake... who is likely to be the bank’s next chairman, wants the job - 13th July
 * Forget shares, Spain has suffered enough - 12th July
 * You could have read it here first, Mr Miliband - 10th July
 * Britain flying high as demand takes off - 6th July
 * Many would walk away, but don’t bet on it - It would be easy to forget that, amid excitement over Bob Diamond’s live-on-TV witch trial, negotiations continue over a $60 billion deal involving two FTSE 100 constituents - 5th July
 * Senior figures may have to speak up - Just who are the “senior figures within Whitehall” to whom the Bank of England’s Deputy Governor Paul Tucker referred in his telephone conversation with Bob - 4th July
 * Diamond drama reflects Brown’s reign of error - It is delightfully ironic to see Ed Miliband aggressively criticising Bob Diamond - 29th June
 * Could this be a Leveson moment for bankers? - The biggest mystery posed by the record fines levied on Barclays by US and British regulators yesterday is why the bank’s shares rose by nearly 2 per cent - 28th June
 * Spain can’t expect much credit at EU summit - Looking forward to a positive outcome from tomorrow’s EU summit? Thought not - 27th June
 * Defence of cynical bonus tests loyalty - Xstrata’s defence of the retention bonus due to its chief executive Mick Davis... - 26th June
 * There are ways to get around tight funding - Judging from the ensuing stampede when Tesco and National Grid invited retail investors to invest in inflation-linked retail bonds, Severn Trent should also brace itself for a gusher of applications - 22nd June
 * More not so bright ideas from Brussels - Europe’s capacity to shoot itself in the foot never ceases to amaze - 21st June
 * Boots deal proved to be a good fit, after all . . . - It was a huge moment when, in May 2007, the barbarians breached the blue-chip gate and Alliance Boots became the first FTSE 100 company to fall to a private equity bid - 20th June
 * Pragmatism rules the waves in Britain - Britain’s senior bankers can thank their lucky stars they are not subject to the Swiss Finish - 15th June
 * First history lesson is don’t rewrite it - Hector Sants is taking a leaf from Gordon Brown’s book - 14th June
 * Give Ireland the credit it deserves - Ireland is not Portugal or Greece. Its economic crisis was not due to chronic uncompetitiveness, an inefficient public sector and over-generous welfare payments - 12th June
 * Bigger picture lost in Spanish sell-off - The IBEX 35, Spain’s equivalent of the FTSE 100 index, lost another 2.6 per cent yesterday - 31st May
 * Hanging on to its biggest asset - British Airways, the old City joke used to run, was a pension fund with an airline attached to it - 31st May
 * Germans can feel the temperature rising - While siren voices urge Germany to rescue the eurozone, either via a consumer boom or agreeing to debt mutualisation, fewer people seem to be thinking about what might be good for Germany itself - 30th May
 * Is shareholder fury really such a bonus? - Ralph Topping and Mick Davis, chief executives respectively of the bookmaker William Hill and miner Xstrata, have more in common than meets the eye - 29th May
 * Lynch’s exit offers hope for next generation - And so, with a wearisome air of inevitability, Hewlett-Packard has decided it can dispense with the services of Mike Lynch, one of Britain’s foremost technology entrepreneurs of the last decade - 25th May
 * Silencing the doubters in course of a decade - In January 2002, Vittorio Colao recalls, his predecessor-but-one as Vodafone’s chief executive, Sir Christopher Gent, threw a huge party when the company notched up its 100 millionth customer worldwide - 23rd May
 * How to lose friends fast on Wall Street - Those who fight Wall Street’s corner — and, indeed, that of the City — against charges that it is a “casino” have their work cut out after Facebook’s shambolic IPO - 22nd May
 * Why sceptics may have sold Facebook short - Those doubtful that Facebook can ever justify its valuation at IPO or repay the faith placed in it by investors should ask Errol Damelin - 18th May
 * Shareholders’ role in getting fees down - Richard Buxton, head of UK equities at Schroders, gave the Commons Treasury Select Committee plenty of common sense on which to chew this week - 17th May
 * Where Greece leads, will others follow? - As the financier Terry Smith reminded visitors to his blog this week, a currency can endure despite a lack of faith in it from foreign investors, but not when it is rejected by its own population - 16th May
 * There is one seat Dimon should quit - It is remarkable that, less than a week after JP Morgan’s chief executive Jamie Dimon admitted the bank had incurred trading losses of $2 billion, some on Wall Street are trying to paint regulators as the villains of the piece - 15th May
 * Ready to make sense of an untidy mess - Under its former chief executive Andrew Moss, Aviva launched a series of ads in which the actor Paul Whitehouse portrayed the insurer’s customers, including a fishing Brummie, a Plymouth Argyle supporter and an elderly Welsh goth - 9th May
 * Helpless in the face of shareholders’ revolt - Baron Sharman of Redlynch OBE, the Aviva chairman, will always have a place in history as Britain’s first accountant to earn more than £1 million a year. As such, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the board he heads is the Shareholder Spring’s biggest victim yet - 4th May
 * Is economy going north or south? - Remember M4? Not the motorway connecting London with Wales, but “broad money”, the money supply measured by the amount of cash in circulation plus bank deposits - 3rd May
 * The price for doing what you’re told - Well, they were only doing as they were bade by Nicolas Sarkozy. European Central Bank data released yesterday shows the extent to which its cheap three-year money was used in March by Spanish and Italian banks to load up on eurozone sovereign debt - 1st May
 * Executive excess? You ain’t seen nothing yet - They do things bigger in America. While we li’l ol’ Brits get cross at Bob Diamond’s pay at Barclays, or the sums with which David Brennan will leave after his lacklustre spell at AstraZeneca, both are minor offences compared with Wall Street’s latest tale of excess - 27th April
 * Testing the patience of the Americans - Those seeking signals on how 2012 has begun will be cheered by results from two American industrial bellwethers - 25th April
 * Canadian route ignores solution on doorstep - Mark Carney has been an outstanding Governor of the Bank of Canada and a fine chairman of the Financial Stability Board. People like Bob Diamond say he is how a central banker should be - 19th April
 * Season for Apple may be coming to an end - It may feel like 1999 again, with Facebook’s astounding $1 billion acquisition of an app-maker that barely enjoys any meaningful revenues, let alone makes anything so rude as a profit - 11th April
 * Quick fix proves no long-term solution - Listen up, Italian business. UniCredit’s chief executive Federico Ghizzoni wants to make you an offer you can’t refuse. He has a big loan he wishes to make available, capiche? - 29th March
 * You always need more friends like these - Please don’t call South Korea an emerging market, at least not within earshot of Jim O’Neill, the chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management - 27th March
 * Debuts create an oasis for parched investors - Amid market falls and the Budget, two highly successful European stock market flotations this week have been largely overlooked - 23rd March
 * Going over the top with Osborne’s new bonds - War Loan is often called the biggest scam perpetrated by a British government on its people - 15th March
 * Onus is on Osborne to maintain attraction - In those long-ago days before he ditched Prudence, Gordon Brown initially tried to promote business in Britain, cutting corporation tax rates in 1997 and 1999. His adviser was a chap called Chris Sanger... - 13th March
 * Mr Draghi’s job is done, but Europe’s is not - It all felt slightly reminiscent of George W. Bush’s notorious “Mission Accomplished” speech of May 2003. Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank President, yesterday declared... - 9th March
 * Putin must deliver on all those promises - Jim O’Neill has a simple answer for those who bore him by demanding that he drop the R from Bric: he reminds them that, this decade - 6th March
 * An addictive habit that will be hard to kick - Like February 29, the chance to borrow unlimited sums of money at only 1 per cent does not come around very often - 1st March
 * Closing loopholes or opening floodgates? - Here’s one for the next pub quiz. Who, in a speech on April 7, 2006, condemned the Chancellor Gordon Brown for imposing “iniquitous, retrospective changes” in taxation? - 29th February
 * Filling in the gaps is not the answer - The Chinese walls within the European Central Bank must be pretty effective - 28th February
 * Irish adventures have left a painful legacy - Royal Bank of Scotland’s chief executive, Stephen Hester, has taken lately to describing the legacy he inherited as the banking world’s biggest-ever time bomb - 24th February
 * A carmaking entente would be welcome - The only Franco-American business combination of note since the notorious expression “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” was used in The Simpsons has been the creation of Alcatel-Lucent in 2006 - 23rd February
 * We’re all now beneath the central bank - The only near-certainty from yesterday’s Greek rescue is that Athens will meet the €14.5 billion bond redemption due on March 20 - 22nd February
 * Accountability veers into summary justice - Lloyds, the bank that likes to say “yes, we’ll take back some of your bonus”, looks to have missed a trick yesterday - 21st February
 * Portugal shows Greece how to handle a crisis - Like a bestselling rock band on a world tour, officials from the “troika” — the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF — have swept into Portugal, where they are assessing progress made since Lisbon was granted a €78 billion bailout - 17th February
 * What will these bright ideas do to inflation? - As the money supply is contracting and net lending by the commercial banks remains weak, Sir Mervyn King was asked yesterday should not the Bank of England be buying assets other than gilts to stimulate the economy - 16th February
 * Days of the past haunt Chancellor’s future - The Moody Blues, with whom older readers may be familiar, topped the album charts in 1970 with A Question of Balance. This, as it happens, was the response to the Chancellor’s Moody’s blues - 15th February
 * A fit of the vapours over Vodafone bid - For a communications business, there seems to be interference on the line from Vodafone - 14th February
 * QE saved Britain – but now we pay the price - The presses are fired up and the Bank of England is to spend another £50 billion on asset purchases - 10th February
 * ‘Glenstrata’ more Mont Blanc than Everest? - The last company to use the project code “Everest” before Glencore and Xstrata adopted it for their merger was AOL, which used it for a restructuring plan in 2009 - 8th February
 * Fudge and fig leaves are not what is needed - Milopita me pandespani is a popular Greek recipe for fudge, and there were certainly lashings available yesterday - 7th February
 * Love of the prize may be stronger than pride - It has been a mating ritual to rival that of the bird of paradise in its complexity. Xstrata’s Mick Davis and Ivan Glasenberg of Glencore have circled each other warily during the past decade - 3rd February
 * The price of fighting on too many fronts - How can a company report a 41 per cent rise in net sales, including a 177 per cent increase in sales of its best-known product during the Christmas trading period, yet be rewarded with a near-10 per cent fall in its share price? - 2nd February
 * Bowing to public opinion carries a heavy cost - Forget Stephen Hester. He is big enough and, despite the ordure poured on him this last week, sensitive enough to public opinion not to dwell too long on his forgone bonus - 31st January
 * Take it from America, our future is bright - For some weeks now the mood music from the United States has been increasingly upbeat - 27th January
 * After the crisis, Daniels is happy to play it safe - It was always slightly unfair that Eric Daniels was as linked by the public with the financial crisis as much as he was. Yes, Mr Daniels was chief executive of Lloyds TSB during its cats - 26th January
 * Bad news? You haven’t heard the half of it - Believe it or not, there are positive aspects to news that Britain’s national debt has blasted through the £1 trillion ceiling for the first time - 25th January
 * A strong case still needs careful presentation - At first blush, the case for letting Universal Music take over EMI’s recorded music arm is clear - 24th January
 * Use carrots not sticks to fight short-termism - Like many, Ed Miliband remains angry at Kraft’s takeover of Cadbury in 2010 - 20th January
 * Samsung puts its faith in investment - While the Government frets about business investment, there are no such worries in South Korea, where Samsung has declared that it will invest $41.4 billion this year - 18th January
 * Amid downgrades, the devil is in the detail - The downgrade by Standard & Poor’s of the European Financial Stability Facility’s creditworthiness is another blow to the eurozone - 17th January
 * Italian may protest, but the markets are right - Listening to Mario Monti yesterday accuse markets of failing to give Italy sufficient credit for the austerity measures he has introduced brought to mind Paul O’Neill - 12th January
 * This could be payback time for the City - With hindsight, it is hard to see how NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Börse ever thought they could get their proposed $9 billion merger past regulators - 11th January
 * The low price of putting cash in a safe haven - It is, frankly, the logical destination given the direction in which sovereign debt markets have been heading... investors are now so nervous they will actually pay for the privilege of lending to Germany - 10th January
 * A neat solution to a murky affair in Congo - The Kolwezi copper mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo may sound like something from an Evelyn Waugh novel but it has, during the past 15 months, almost laid waste to the reputation of several of Britain’s top corporate figures - 6th January
 * March of the makers hasn’t set off yet - From the moment it took office, the Government has spoken loudly and often about the need to rebalance the economy towards manufacturing - 5th January
 * Sunlight shed on the thinking at the Fed - Monetary management is a mystifying business and, for most of the past three decades, the US Federal Reserve’s former chairman Alan Greenspan did his best to preserve that mystique - 4th January



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