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President Putin built up his authority by promoting mates of his from KGB to senior posts in the government and economy. Now president Medvedev is doing the same, but instead of promoting spooks, he’s promoting people from a legal and business background, like him.
In his first cabinet reshuffle, announced today, Medvedev began to promote [...]

One of the trends we’ve seen in investment banking over the last two or three years is what PWC calls the ‘global war for talent’. Local banks in rich emerging market countries have more money to spend than their troubled rivals on Wall Street, so they’re hiring the top talent from western banks to join [...]

I’m in Ukraine, land of black soil. Ukraine is already an important player in the global food crisis - it’s a big exporter of wheat, and one of the reasons wheat prices have spiked this year is because Ukraine had a particularly bad harvest last year. This year, it’s been a rainy March and April, [...]

We’re now in the point-the-finger phase of the present financial crisis. The G7 says its all the banks’ faults, and wants to increase their capital adequacy requirements. The banks say its nobody’s fault, and want governments to bail them out. Many economists say its Alan Greenspan’s fault for cutting rates so low and for [...]

I’ve started writing about Islamic finance as of a few months ago. It’s a fascinating, bizarre market, fusing as it does the world of ancient religious law with the world of international finance. And it’s an increasingly important market, because the Middle East is suddenly where all the capital is, so companies, banks, funds and [...]

I recently interviewed Sergei Markov, who is a key spin-doctor to the Kremlin. He told me that the West had completely underestimated the extent to which things will change under Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev.
He said: “Most western observers expect no change because Medvedev is the new president. On the contrary, Putin chose Medvedev precisely [...]

I posted a few weeks ago suggesting that one of the big -isms of this century would be transhumanism, or the idea that humans can ‘evolve’ to higher beings through the use of technology.
On that theme, I’ve been digging the news story recently about the legal battle by Oscar Pistorius, also known as the Blade [...]

Record commodities prices have given countries like China, Singapore, Russia, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and UAE control over trillions of dollars, which they have stowed away in sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), that are now hovering over the global financial system like mighty hoovers, sucking up whatever assets cross their path.
The SWFs have, in the last 12 [...]

I was astounded to read today of the FSB’s arrest of Ilya Zaslavsky, who’s a manager at TNK-BP in Moscow, and also the organizer of the Russian branch of the Oxford Alumni, on charges of industrial espionage.
The Russian-Oxford alumni association held monthly drinks in Moscow, which I went along to a few times. Can’t say [...]

The foreign banks active in Russia tend to have a far more informed and less cliched view of Russian politics than foreign policy analysts in Washington or London. They also tend to have better contacts with Kremlin sources than foreign diplomats, particularly the woeful British embassy in Moscow.
Banking analysts and strategists have been quick to [...]

Back in September 2002, I wrote a cover story for Euromoney called ‘The End of Unfettered Capitalism’. I interviewed various wise sages of finance (Joseph Stiglitz, George Soros, er…Ann Pettifor) who opined to me of the end of neo-liberalism and the need for a new economic model.
Back then, in the aftermath of Enron [...]

Lord Bell, PR guru and Tory peer, has plied his dark arts for some fairly controversial characters in the past - Augusto Pinochet, Boris Berezovsky, Michael Chernoi, even Margaret Thatcher - but even he might have his hands full with his latest project: spinning Aleksander Lukashenko, the iron man of Belarus and the ‘last dictator [...]

Dark times in western markets. The financial press at the moment reads like a particularly gloomy prophesy from the Middle Ages. This from Euroweek:
Undreamt of volatility in dollar swap spreads…Debt professionals watched in disbelief as dollar swap spreads shot out to their widest level in years. ‘Now the world is definitely coming to an end, [...]

Am back in Moscow for a week, working on a story. The impression I get from my meetings so far is that the West has underestimated the extent to which a new era has begun in Russian politics, and the extent to which Russia genuinely has a new leader, with his own agenda, in Dmitry [...]

‘Clueless’. That’s how the financial press is summing up our politicians’ understanding of financial markets.
The ignorance of most politicians about the basics of financial markets was cruelly exposed, say both IFR and Euroweek (two of the City’s leading organs), by the furore in the Houses of Parliament over the fact that Northern Rock had securitized [...]

The best way to understand the present is to read science fiction. Only sci-fi writers are dreaming far enough into the future to tell us where we are in the present.
This week, the news read like science fiction. In South Korea, a company called RNL Bio received the first-ever commercial order for cloning. An American [...]

Looks like another mate of Boris Berezovsky’s might have been assassinated in London…This time it’s Arkadi Patarkatsishvili, or Badri as he was more commonly known, who was the richest man in Georgia, and Berezovsky’s long-time partner.
He was found dead yesterday in Leatherhead, outside London. He was 52, and apparently died of ‘heart failure’. The police [...]

As the unshakeable solidity of the world’s financial markets turns out to be a castle in the sky, we all wish someone had warned us about collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and the dangers of securitization, before it was too late.
But wait…I did! When I was a young cub reporter covering the securitization market back in [...]

For a oil-glutted, stagnant dictatorship, Russian politics has more twists and turns than a bad Jackie Collins novel. When it looked like Putin was going to make himself prime minister and some old crony the president, as of today it looks very likely that his young deputy prime-minister, Dmitri Medvedev, will be handed the heavy burden of the presidency. Attached is an exclusive interview that Medvedev gave to me and a few other hundred journalists last year, and my impressions of the man about to stride onto the world stage.

Last week actually, but still top of the charts:
DER SPIEGEL: Mr President, former Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder
called you a ‘pure democrat’. Do you consider yourself such?
VLADIMIR PUTIN: (laughs) Am I a ‘pure democrat’? Of course I am,
absolutely. But do you know what the problem is? Not even a problem but
a real tragedy? The problem is [...]

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