A Long Time In Finance

Ashes to Ashes: The Decline And Fall of Coal-Fired Electricity

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. …

Overpaid and Unaccountable

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 Dav…

An Audience With The Bond Market's Wyatt Earp

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, …

Libor and the Law

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 rece…

The Great Online Money Laundry

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 t…

From The Corset to Help To Buy: A British Housing Story (Part 2)

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…

From The Corset to Help To Buy: A British Housing Story (Part 1)

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 financ…

The Amazon Octopus

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 i…

Michael Jensen: High Priest of Greed

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 equit…

Fallen Angels: Thames Water Circles the Plughole

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 Th…