A Long Time In Finance

Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. These materials built the world we live in, and they will transform our future. Neil and Jonathan talk to writer and broadcaster Ed Conway about raw materials that drive our economies, who controls them, and how that affects Britain's place in the world Presented by Jonathan Ford and Neil Collins. With Ed Conway. Produced and edited by Nick Hilton for Pod...

Coal once powered the Industrial Revolution and made Britain the richest country on earth. Now with the closure of the country's last coal-fired power station, it will cease to play any meaningful part in the economic life of the nation. Aside from welcoming a cleaner, greener future, what are we to make of this momentous departure? Together with Ewan Gibbs from Glasgow University, Neil...

That's how the public increasingly sees today's managerial elite. Bosses enjoy vast rewards without seeming to be accountable for their decisions - at least the ones that go wrong. The economist (and old friend of Altif ) Dan Davies has an answer: they've created what he calls an "unaccountability sink" which is delivering terrible business outcomes. Neil and Jonathan investigate. Presen...

One of Britain's best known bond fund managers, and also founder of the "Bond Vigilante" blog, Jim Leaviss is leaving the City after 32 years to train as an art historian. Neil and Jonathan caught up with him to look back on his City career, the huge bull market in bonds of recent decades, and the threats that lie in store from international instability, political turmoil and deteriorating pu...

When banks were found to have manipulated the Libor rate during the financial crisis, they paid a whopping $8bn in fines but only a few junior traders went to prison. In a joint episode with Law & Disorder podcast, we look at the recently appealed cases of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palumbo, and ask whether justice has been served. Presented by Jonathan Ford and Neil Collins. With Nicholas Mostyn and...

One of the more striking crime statistics is that burglary is down 90% in England and Wales since the 1990s. That doesn't reflect more upright behaviour. Nope, it's just that villains are increasingly moving their operations online. We talk to author Geoff White about how Silicon Valley is helping the bad guys go digital by making it easier for them not only to con people and rob, but also to...

How did housing in Britain go from somewhere to live to being everyone's favourite financial asset? In the second of our two part series, we look at housing policy since 1970; and ask whether there has ever been a coherent approach. Also is there a natural level of home ownership and should we be encouraging everyone to buy? With Cambridge University housing expert&nb...

How did housing in Britain go from somewhere to live to everyone's favourite financial asset? In the first of a two part series, we look at the mortgage market since 1970; and ask whether the high prices and low supply we endure today are a financial phenomenon. With former building societies supremo Mark Boleat. Presented by Jonathan Ford and Neil Collins. With Mark Boleat. Produced and edited by...

When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, it was an online bookshop. Now its tentacles are everywhere: it's a marketplace for third party goods from around the world, a huge cloud computing business and America's largest parcel delivery group. But is this a good thing or a bad one? We talk to Dana Mattioli of the Wall Street Journal about whether Amazon is the consumer''s friend or a monopolist to r...

The economist Michael Jensen, who died this month, did as much as any single thinker to shape modern financial capitalism. To his detractors, he was the High Priest of Greed who justified stratospheric CEO pay and predatory private equity. His admirers believe he revived Anglo Saxon capitalism. We discuss his ideas and legacy with the independent researcher and private equity expert Pete...

A natural monopoly delivering an essential service, Thames Water was privatised in 1989 with no debt. Now it's on its knees, crushed by more than £15bn of borrowings. Neil and Jonathan talk to Feargal Sharkey about what this says about Mrs Thatcher's most controversial privatisation, whether incentive regulation works, and whether we should just scrap the whole private structure and...

GEC was a British manufacturing titan; a cash-rich producer of everything from washing machines to railway trains. Then in a few years, it rebranded and restructured, shedding most of the old industrial bits to focus on telecoms. The result? By 2005, shiny new Marconi was no more. In the second of our Fallen Angel series, we talk to industrial historian Nick Comfort about one of the most abru...

For decades ICI was Britain's largest manufacturing company - a giant fixed point around which the rest of industry orbited. Then, in little more than a decade, it split itself up, sold many of its traditional businesses, and ran up big debts buying fancy but not very profitable fragrance companies. In 2006, the end came when it sold itself to a Dutch company and disappeared. We talk to writer and...

Remember Pets.com? Or Ask Jeeves? The dot com bubble of 25 years ago might have been a seismic event in markets. But was it just a collective moment of madness, or a deeper transformational moment? Or both? As AI stocks shoot towards the stratosphere, we talk to internet historian Brian McCullough , host of the Techmeme Ride Home podcast ,  about what we can learn from the last great tech bub...

One of Britain's better-known economic forecasters, Roger Bootle, set up his consultancy Capital Economics 25 years ago. He made his name predicting the "death of inflation" on which he wrote an influential book in the 1990s. We discuss the importance of economic history, favourite writers, monetarism, bright spots in the world economy, and Britain's many problems with growth. Presented...

In the second of our series on Privatisation and Popular Capitalism, we look at the biggest and riskiest privatisation of all - the 1987 sale of the UK's 31% stake in BP. How the Chancellor Nigel Lawson gambled that the markets were good for a quick £7bn. Prepare for the world's shortest pricing meeting, diplomatic rows with Kuwaitis and lots of long faced underwriters. And our gues...

Along with the sale of council houses, privatisation was a signature theme of Mrs Thatcher's government. Its aim was not just more efficient businesses, but a "share owning democracy" that would purge Britain of the "corrosive effect of socialism". With its "Tell Sid" campaign, British Gas was the high water mark of privatisation. Neil and Jonathan talk to author Philip Augar about "stagging", Ced...

What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to green energy is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable. This is the conundrum at the heart of economist Brett Christophers' provocative new book. Neil and Jonathan joined him to discuss why lower wind and solar costs may not equal a green bonanza....

Unipart, once an unloved division of British Leyland, has grown steadily since its buyout 37 years ago, eschewing the stock market and building a "Mittelstand" like relationship with employees, customers and suppliers. Neil and Jonathan talk to John Neill, its long standing boss, about car parts, purpose versus City short-termism and why more companies don't embrace the "Unipart Way". Present...

To some it might seem like the plot of a Jeffrey Archer novel: identical twins born to hardship who graft their way up together and ultimately get to own the Ritz Hotel, the Daily Telegraph and a socking great castle in the Channel Islands. But the story of Frederick and David Barclay is much stranger than that. With the Barclays back in the news as they attempt to recover control of the Tele...

Bill Gross was the "Master of the Universe" who got the world's attention when he declared in 2010 that UK government debt was sitting "on a bed of nitroglycerine". The man who built the modern bond markets, Gross seemed to have it all. But then he blew up his career just a few short years later with some very strange behaviour. We talk to Mary Childs, journalist and author of a book on Gross, abo...

What links the iconic Sydney Opera House, Monsters Inc and the mess that is HS2? Well, they involve all giant projects and most conform to the "iron law" that schemes costing $1bn or more always end up over time and budget. According to the data, a piddling 0.5% get delivered on time, for the right price, and produce the forecast benefits. So with the world facing a mountain of infrastructure...

At the recent COP conference, the UK, along with 21 other countries, promised to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. But what does that mean, and how can these plants be built without the delays and cost overruns that marked nuclear projects in the 1970s and 1980s - the last time Britain had a nuclear programme? Neil and Jonathan talk to Tim Stone, head of the UK's Nuclear In...

Crypto's demise seems to have been exaggerated, a bit like Mark Twain's. After the collapse of FTX, multiple coin failures and the arrest of various coinigarchs at airports, Neil and Jonathan talk to bitcoin expert Matthew Pines about the digital, bankless currencies strange ability to shrug off these disasters and what the future may hodl.  Presented by Jonathan Ford...

It's got a long history going back to Robert Maxwell and Sir James Goldsmith's long-running battle to bankrupt Private Eye, but in recent years so-called "lawfare" has become a veritable industry. We talk to David Hooper, solicitor and author of Buying Silence about the ways in which companies have used libel and privacy laws to squash their critics, the numerous abuses, a...