A year ago I attended an informal briefing in Washington by a senior British policymaker who lamented the passing of the International Monetary Fund as an institution of any worth. Globalisation meant that bankrupt nations no longer needed IMF medicine to cure their ills. Rather, they could obtain all the finance they required from the global banking system without strings attached.

Instead of a nasty IMF able to topple governments [...]

Every few months an invitation arrives on my desk to a meet a member of the shadow cabinet at an event organised by the "Conservative City Circle". These events, held in distinctive City locations such as the Mansion House, are designed to introduce movers and shakers in the Square Mile to David Cameron, George Osborne and other senior Conservatives.

The "cocktail parties", as they are engagingly described on the group's [...]

You would have been hard-pressed to hear the words "Northern Rock" at last year's Labour conference in Bournemouth. It was the financial crisis which dared not speak its name. Yet the effort by Gordon Brown to pretend that the first mass run on a British bank since the 1860s hadn't happened is a startling metaphor for the disaster that has hit global banking and the Labour Party ever since.

Polling [...]

The narrative of Gordon Brown's ten years as chancellor looked irresistible: ten years of non-inflationary growth, the longest upturn in British economic history for 200 years, 59 quarters (which became 63) of uninterrupted growth, and so on. Brown liked kicking sand in the eyes of his critics, the City scribblers and the analysts who were so often bettered in their economic forecasts by him and the Treasury.

But out of [...]

Until a year ago the word "crunch" was something associated with a chocolate bar or a competitive sports event. No one outside the esoteric world of the interbank market - where financial institutions swap loans - would have applied it to an economic condition. Twelve months on from 9 August 2007, the day the markets froze over, it has become a headline writers' favourite and part of the national dialogue.

The revelation that Labour is loosening the fiscal rules, a funda mental tenet of Brownomics, has been greeted with "end of prud ence" type headlines or as another nail in new Labour's coffin.

There appears to be a collective determination in the media (of which I am part) and among the chattering classes to talk us into a deep funk. Actually, the Treasury decision to kick away the traces of [...]

Quite recently I had lunch with the chairman of one of the world's largest oil companies. He has a simple test that tells him whether the surge in the world oil price is the result of supply or refining difficulties, or can be explained by other factors such as geopolitical uncertainty or financial transactions such as hedging - a polite word for speculation.

If, as he drives past the huge [...]

The scene at the Athens Seminar, an annual economic gathering held for the past three decades, was something straight out of Labour's past. Sitting on the end of the platform was Lord Healey, Labour's chancellor of the exchequer at the time of the 1976 sterling crisis, brought back at the ripe age of 90 for this special anniversary. And the main topic of discussion among the international bankers, economists and [...]

Over the next few days, millions of private investors will receive a fat wodge of documents from Bradford & Bingley (B&B), Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) and others inviting them to buy new shares at bargain prices. Of course, there is no such thing.

The big banks have been foolish, investing too heavily in American trailer-park mortgages and over-lending at home, and they now need the shareholders to bail them [...]

One of Gordon Brown's great strengths as chancellor was his international reputation. In his role as chairman of the International Monetary Fund's main policy committee, he was able to strut the global stage acting as Mister Fixit. When he called upon oil-exporting countries to open spigots to ease prices for crude oil, he was listened to. His calls for talks on open trade and his work with developing countries won [...]