There’s too many to list who came out in front of our dear Prime Minister but here’s the top ten:
1 Barack Obama President United States of America 48
2 Hu Jintao President People’s Republic of China 66
3 Vladimir Putin Prime Minister Russia 57
4 Ben S. Bernanke Chairman Federal Reserve 55
5 Sergey Brin and Larry Page Founders Google 36
6 Carlos Slim Helu Chief executive Telmex 69
7 Rupert Murdoch Chairman News Corp. 78
8 Michael T. Duke President, CEO and Director Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. 59
9 Abdullah bin Abdul …

So British Airways last night sealed a £4bn merger deal with Spanish airline Iberia to create an aviation giant. The two loss-making companies said they had reached a preliminary agreement for a tie-up that will see BA shareholders take 55 per cent of the combined group, with Iberia holding the remaining 45 per cent.

Whilst Willie Walsh has said the planned mergeris “great news for British Airways, our customers and our shareholders”. Surprise, surprise BA’s greatest critic Virgin Atlantic have …

Ok, so lots of people have been writing off the good old USA but not these two. They might have a vested interest in this but they are also two of the smartest guys in business so worth listening to maybe…

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Details of what went on inside the courtroom have begun to emerge. The US authorites are obviously gutted to have seen more Wall Streeters escape their clutches. So what happened? Here are a couple of rather revealing extracts which show how the boys’ cast-iron defence saw off the nasty regulators:

Aram Hong, a juror from Woodside, Queens, said the exchanges between Cioffi and Tannin shown to the jury proved to her that the two men were working “24-7” to save …

It’s got to sting the banker’s heart a bit when the richest man on the planet says he believes Wall Street pay is “often too high”.

Gates told a discussion on philanthropy (now his main line of interest)  in New York that (Reuters):

“The compensation problem is a very interesting problem. I do think compensation is often too high, but it’s a very tough problem to solve.”

Now, no-one can argue that Gates said this out of envy or that he wanders …

The Bank Of England is betting the farm that by putting the UK’s economy on stimulants, it will recapture all the lost output during the recession, it will be able to time the stimulus exit perfectly and avoid hyperinflation. In the process it will create a recovery in half the time of previous recessions.

Or as the Bank put it, output is projected to grow by 2.1 per cent next year and by four per cent in 2011, inflation …

The arguments heated up in Jordan Wimmers tribunal against Mark Lowe yesterday. Lowe, who runs the hedge fund Nomos Capital, was accused of bringing an escort to a serious business event wearing tight Dior hotpants and stilettos.

However, Mr Lowe’s representative, Elizabeth Melville, responded that any women he brought along were ‘his girlfriends’. And this one in particular, Natalia Malagina, was also highly qualified, had worked for two investment banks, and is now studying at Lausanne University for an MBA.

Miss …

Moving on to the humanist segment of the World’s population, Lloyd Blankfein told a banker’s conference in New York: “I often hear references to higher compensation at Goldman,” …. “What people fail to mention is that net income generated per head is a multiple of our peer average. The people of Goldman Sachs are among the most productive in the world.”

There may be some mileage in claiming your employees are the best of the best when it comes to …

No conviction for US prosecutors on this one.

Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers, have been cleared of three counts of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud.

Government prosecutors accused them of encouraging investors to keep their money in two of the bank’s hedge funds, Bear’s High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund and High-Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leverage Fund just before they collapsed. The funds were mainly invested in collateralised debt …

Kraft’s hostile £9.8bn takeover offer for Cadburys was dismissed by the paternalistic British confectioner yesterday. The offer was seen as derisory and ‘irritating’ to the company’s shareholders.

“Kraft’s offer does not come remotely close to reflecting the true value of our company, and involves the unattractive prospect of the absorption of Cadbury into a low growth conglomerate business model,” said Cadbury chairman Roger Carr.

Sounds like a resounding no then.

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Jordan Wimmer, 29 claims she was hounded from her £500k a year job by a hedge fund boss who openly used prostitutes and made her visit strip clubs.

This job posting was put on the giant US classifieds site Craigslist. It’s certainly one of the more unusual posts we have seen advertising for folk with good spreadsheet skills. Here is a link to the original.

Expert in Spreadsheets
Date: 2009-11-08, 11:24PM EST
Reply to: job-ehtud-1457503611@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

We need someone to work on a complex financial project. You must be a whiz with advanced spreadsheets. We are putting together a biz plan and need to run many scenarios. You …

If you didn’t catch Lloyd Blankfein’s charm offensive in the Times pitched just ahead of this year’s bonus season then you should check it out.

Not content with doing the work of ordinary mortals, Lloyd and co are “doing God’s work” according to the master himself.

“We’re very important,” he says “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more …

Gordon Brown’s suggestions of a ‘Tobin tax’ on Saturday got short shrift from Canada’s finance minister Jim Flaherty and US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

Then the International Monetary Fund’s director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said it would be unworkable.

And now City leaders and opposition politicians have waded in dismissing it as a “theoretical proposal” that would be impossible to put into effect without disastrous consequences for London.

Likelihood of that gaining momentum before the election. Nil.

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It might not be quite what the Manc band The Stone Roses were thinking of but there’s a gold rush on and everyone is trying to catch the train – gold spiked to $1,100 an ounce on Friday.

Last month Harrods launched a range of gold products to satisfy its customers including solid bars favoured by Bond baddies. Anyone with a spare £300k can get hold of one and the Knightsbridge store will hold it safely for you. In the …

From one gamble to another…

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Having avoided government assistance over the bailouts, Barclays and Nomura are looking to mop up talent.

Both Tokyo based Nomura and Barclays took slices of the remains of Lehman in order to boost their global reach and to compete with firms such as Citigroup  and Morgan Stanley.

Now, according to Bloomberg, Barclays and Nomura, never previously ranked among the top 10 merger advisers worldwide in the past decade, are luring hundreds of bankers as competitors cut jobs and cap bonuses under …

If there was ever a good time to make some dodgy coin, whilst everyone is distracted by financial panic was probably it. Pulling it off right in front of everyones’ noses whilst they are convinced you are doing something for them is probably the oldest trick in the book; or as Keyser Soze put it, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.”

Last year’s financial panic doubtless gave many an opportunist the …

The Bank of England says it will pour another 25 billion pounds into the economy and keep its main interest rate at 0.5 percent for the eighth consecutive month. The rate of spending will slow though in an attempt to finely balance rebooting the UK’s weakling economy and at the same time weening it off the financial adrenalin shots (or methadone depending on your point of view).

The decision to continue the stimulation comes two weeks after disappointing news that …

Despite protesting that he had only a “rough understanding” of insider trading and had learnt more about it from the film Wall Street than he had during the six months he spent with Hoare Govett, Matthew Uberoi has been found guilty of the charge. Southwark Crown Court found Matthew Uberoi and his father Neel Uberoi guilty of 12 counts of insider dealing. The trades netted them about £110,000.

The Financial Services Authority brought the case against Neel Uberoi and …