Comment, analysis and other offerings from Tuesday’s FT,
The FT’s first comment offering of 2011 is a special debate on the most important global issue of the coming year: will this be the year the once-unstoppable force of economic, financial and cultural globalisation begins to reverse? Five of the world’s leading commentators debate the question. Gideon Rachman kicks off the debate, arguing that globalisation will backslide in the coming year. Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz agrees with him. But Google CEO Eric Schmidt, former EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson and Indian thinker and business leader Nandan Nilkeni all disagree – but for different reasons.
Analysis: Battles loom between creditors and borrowers
A few weeks ago, a large US investment bank asked a discreet question of its biggest institutional investor clients. How long would it be before the debt crisis that has struck Europe reached the US? One, two or three years, or never? “Under 10 per cent said “never,” says a banker involved in the polling, the FT’s Richard Milne reports. Last year brought the eurozone debt crisis. Greece and Ireland had to be bailed out and big question marks still hang over Portugal and Spain. But the focus is now likely to widen. The question for 2011 is how much of the western world could be caught up.
Notebook: Brian Groom – Brace yourself for the jitters
Let us call it a spring of discomfort, the FT columnist says. Notebook is loath to predict a season of discontent, having seen so many come to nought, but the next few months will test the UK’s governing coalition, possibly to breaking point. It could be unsettling for businesses, too, with recovery expected to falter – temporarily, we must hope – in the first quarter.
Lex on the renminbi going viral
“If you want to see capitalism in action,” said Milton Friedman, “go to Hong Kong.” Beijing is taking him up on that. As it seeks to broaden ownership of its currency, China is using the special administrative region as a giant petri dish, Lex says. Conventional wisdom was that it would take decades, rather than years, for the renminbi to become a third pillar of the global monetary system. Not any more.
Analysis: Europe’s banks, a tale of two (unequal) halves
So loud have the prophecies been, predicting the imminent end of the eurozone, that it would have been easy to miss the fact that in terms of bank performance, at least, Europe has already split into two, if you look at banks’ share price-to-book valuations, writes the FT’s Patrick Jenkins. UK banks join their German and Italian peers in multiples close to 1, whereas Spanish institutions are more generously valued.
Management: Stress in the executive suite
“Sometimes we have to prise a BlackBerry out of a client’s hand with a crowbar to stop them going into a scanner,” says the medical director of Preventicum, a London clinic that screens corporate clients for mental and physical health issues. Executive burnout is rarely discussed in the corporate world, the FT’s Jeremy Lemer reports. But the problem is more common than employers admit.