Robert Peston Blog's profile

The memo written by Jeremy Hunt in November about News Corp's BSkyB bid seems to explain almost everything that transpired in relation to the bid over the succeeding six months or so. Here is the important passage: "What James Murdoch wants to do is to repeat what his father did with the move to Wapping and crate the world's first multi-platform media operator, available from paper to web to TV to iPhone to iPad. Isn't this what all media companies have to do ultimately? And, if so, we must be very careful...

(22 hours ago)

Robert Peston Blog wrote a new blog post titled Free banking "a dangerous myth"

Andrew Bailey, a director of the Bank of England who will soon become the City's top regulator, has said that free banking is dangerous and needs to be reformed by the government. Bailey says that free banking both misleads customers about how they are really paying for banking services, and also means that banks themselves may not properly understand the costs of the products and services they supply. This fuzziness about the costs of banking services means there is a greater risk that banks will mis-sell other...

(2 days ago)

Robert Peston Blog wrote a new blog post titled Government becomes banker to the private sector

In recent months, investors have been lending tens of billions of pounds of interest-free money to the British government: only when the Exchequer wants to borrow for more than ten years has it been forced to pay a rate of interest that is likely to exceed the inflation rate (see here for more on this). So the real interest rate on George Osborne's debt is less than zero; that's what we would have called jammy, a few years back. Now there are two competing explanations for why he can borrow so cheaply....

(3 days ago)

About:

Robert has won numerous awards for his journalism, including Journalist of the Year, Specialist Journalist of the Year and Scoop of the Year (twice) from the Royal Television Society, Performer of the Year from the Broadcasting Press Guild, and Broadcaster of the Year and Journalist of the Year from the Wincott Foundation.

Prior to joining the BBC, he was political editor and financial editor of the Financial Times, City Editor of the Sunday Telegraph and a columnist for the New Statesman and Sunday Times.

He broadcast and published a series of influential reports about the causes and consequences of the global financial crisis.

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