ANY OTHER BUSINESS| MARTIN VANDER WEYER
Falli ng US sha res tell u s only t hat
investors were overexcited in January
to exterminate the rats in the palace of the
Sultana of Morocco. Now real life has gone
one better: the 84-year-old former lord chief
justice Lord Woolf has been appointed to
head a new commercial court in Kazakh-
stan, wearing specially designed robes and
taking with him, on five visits a year, a team
of other British jurists and QCs in the sunset
of their careers.
A country of vast mineral wealth
beneath empty steppes, Kazakhstan is ruled
in old-fashioned style by President Nursul-
tan Nazarbayev, who has high ambitions for
its developing economy. That makes it just
the sort of place where we’d like to raise
our export game, chiefly by selling specialist
expertise in the oil, gas and mining indus-
tries, as well as services such as architecture
and education: Haileybury was the first Brit-
ish public school to open an outpost there.
But we’d feel more comfortable doing so if
we could also be assured of more respect for
the rule of law than is customary in Central
Asian fiefdoms. Selling the Kazakhs a plane-
load of judges looks like a win-win solution.Civilising influences
Your suggestions for companies that have
made a ‘benignly egalitarian value-for-
money contribution to modern civilisation’
to match Ikea’s were many and varied. I’m
happy to include Laker Airways as the low-
cost pioneer before Ryanair, eBay ‘for glo-
balising the car-boot sale’, Travelodge and
its ilk for budget hotel rooms, Hoover for
easier housework, Singer for home sewing
machines, ICI for beta-blockers and Lever
Bros for mass-produced soap. Tampax Inc,
founded in 1936 and now part of Procter &
Gamble, is an obviously worthy addition.
And I’m grateful to my Wiki Man colleague
Rory Sutherland for a quote from The Phi-
losophy of Andy Warhol about the demo-
cratic nature of American consumerism:
‘A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money
can get you a better Coke than the one the
bum on the corner is drinking.’ I just don’t
see what that’s got to do with civilisation.I
f you were the incoming or retiring
chairman of the Federal Reserve, you
might be quietly pleased to see stock
markets plunge on the day of the handover.
As Jerome Powell was sworn in on Monday
to succeed Dr Janet Yellen as head of Amer-
ica’s central bank, the Dow Jones index of
leading US stocks was falling by a one-day
record of 1,175 points, with Asian, European
and London markets following overnight.
But this wiping out of recent gains does
not reflect badly on Yellen, whose steady
hand leaves behind US inflation at just
2 per cent, unemployment barely above
4 per cent and a strongly recapitalised bank-
ing system. Nor does it indicate any radical
shift to be expected from ‘Jay’ Powell, a law-
yer-turned-banker who was widely seen as
the most sensible ‘continuity’ choice Donald
Trump could have made for the Fed, short of
awarding Yellen the second term she would
very much have liked.
What it does reflect is the over-exuber-
ance of investors who piled into equities
in January, driving the Dow from 24,800 to
26,600 and creating seriously out-of-whack
price-earnings multiples; worry that full
employment will lead to an upsurge in wage-
led inflation; certainty that interest rates will
rise this year but may have to do so faster if
inflation does revive; and rising fear of what
higher rates will do to over-borrowed com-
panies and consumers.
These are all real concerns, especially
the incipient debt problems. But the only
new factor has been the steepness of the
share-price rise since the beginning of the
year. Hence most US pundits described this
week’s fall as a ‘correction’ that was wide-
ly foreseen and probably overdue, rather
than the beginning of a crash to match 2008.
Some even saw it as a buying opportunity,
and we might wonder whether that includes
whoever manages the Trump family’s invest-
ment portfolio these days.
Only a month ago, the President was
claiming the strength of the 2017 stock mar-
ket and January’s ‘record fastest 1,000 point
move in history’ (though in fact it wasn’t),
as both a by-product and an endorsement
of his achievements in office. But if the cor-
rection turns into a more sustained wave of
selling, will the President send his man into
the exchange —emulating the Wall Street
aristocrat Richard Whitney on 29 October
1928 — to bid up blue-chip stocks against
the storm tide? Somehow I doubt it.All change again
Regular passengers on the East Coast
mainline are inured to change — and baf-
fled as to why this transport artery can-
not be run at a steady but modest profit by
a private-sector operator. We recall with
sadness the demise of GNER, the first post-
privatisation franchisee from 1996 to 2007:
part of the Sea Containers group that also
owned the Venice-Simplon Orient Express,
its service standards won passenger loyalty
but it overbid for franchise renewal in 2005
and ran into losses; its parent went bust the
following year.
Then we had to put up with back-to-
basics National Express East Coast, which
lasted barely two years before defaulting, fol-
lowed by five years under a taxpayer-owned
‘operator of last resort’. In 2015 the fran-
chise was re-let, this time to Virgin, though
the operation is 90 per cent owned by Stage-
coach, better known as a Scottish bus com-
pany. Now that too has failed and Transport
Secretary Chris Grayling is searching for yet
another solution. A state-run entity is likely
to take over within ‘a few months’. But I’m
hoping it will involve the German state —
whose Deutsche Bahn owns, through Arri-
va, many of Britain’s better trains — rather
than another shuffling of the pack among
our own incompetent rail bureaucrats.A planeload of judges
This winter’s panto plot — you may recall
that I was playing the dame — felt a touch
far-fetched when future Lord Mayor of Lon-
don Dick Whittington achieved an unlike-
ly British export triumph by lending his cat