Posted: November 16th, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, Travellers's Tales | No Comments »
Spending time in London with overseas visitors is to see the UK’s capital through different eyes. When those eyes belong to insolvency practitioners from all over the world, the risk is that the view will inevitably be jaundiced, especially when these vampires of the recession start comparing their countries’ financial woes and the incompetence of their political leaders.
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Posted: September 27th, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, Travellers's Tales | Tags: debt, eurozone, Italy, politics, venice | No Comments »
The name of Venice’s airport prepares visitors nicely for the impracticalities of getting around one of the world’s most charismatic cities. Surely Marco Polo must have faced as many obstacles on the Silk Road as unwary tourists here, from marauding brigands (for which read touts for the wildly expensive cafes and restaurants in the Piazza San Marco) and local warlords exacting a high tariff for safe passage (the €110 water taxi ride into the City).
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Posted: September 13th, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, Travellers's Tales | Tags: banking, debt, Economy, gdp, Poland, profit, retail, spending | No Comments »
Leaving a storm-threatened UK for a balmy, late summer day in Warsaw seemed the perfect metaphor for the comparative strengths of the two economies. Poland continues to be a minor but extremely creditable financial miracle.
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Posted: September 13th, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, Travellers's Tales | Tags: Berlin, Chancellor Merkle, crisis, Economy, eurozone, germany, growth | No Comments »
Flying into a quiet Berlin’s Tegel Airport less than a week after Germany shocked itself and the world by announcing a shuddering halt to its previous strong climb out of recession was a first step into a world of strange uncertainty.
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Posted: August 11th, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, Travellers's Tales | No Comments »
Escaping from the rolling road block of the M5 motorway into picturesque Devon in a warm August rain squall promised a voyage of discovery into the delights of this year’s must-take tourist activity in austerity-battered UK, the great British staycation.
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Posted: June 30th, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, Travellers's Tales | No Comments »
China imported 33.5m bottles of Bordeaux wines worth $475m in 2010. No wonder the price of an average 2008 Grand Cru Classé at a small St Emilion merchant’s tasting outlet defies current European economic logic at an eye watering €49 a bottle. With the nouveau riche from India and Russia adding to the upward price pressure, Bordeaux can afford at least for the moment to ignore the complaints of budget-conscious developed-world wine buffs that claret is no longer affordable. The world still drinks 14 bottles of the stuff every second.
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Posted: June 21st, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, Travellers's Tales | No Comments »
Arriving in New York immediately after the stratospheric success of the public listing of LinkedIn Corp when the stock doubled in price on the first day’s trading, the temptation was to ask whether investors’ memories really are so short that the dot.com bust of 2001 has already become pre-history. A near repeat initial performance only days later in the Pandora Radio IPO made cynical observers recall the old cliché about boxes and their contents. Fortunately common sense prevailed and Pandora ended its first day up by only 9%.
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Posted: June 2nd, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: Travellers's Tales | No Comments »
A strange co-incidence brought a group of international insolvency and restructuring experts to the same Limassol hotel this past weekend as a combined meeting of IMF and World Bank representatives from far and wide. It was a powerful reminder of events in nearby Greece, where the outcome of the sovereign debt crisis remains in the balance, not helped by the latest collapse of negotiations between rival political groupings aimed at creating consensus on much needed austerity measures.
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Posted: April 18th, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, Travellers's Tales | No Comments »
Paris Nord station was its usual mid morning bustle and chaos, but the sight of what looked for all the world like riot police directing the taxi queue was quite a shock until the realisation dawned that these were in fact a new breed of touts, offering to whisk Eurostar travellers through the traffic on the back of a motor bike.
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Posted: March 21st, 2011 | Author: Nick Hood | Filed under: All, Travellers's Tales | No Comments »
Few business trips can have been quite as surreal as the past few days in Singapore, not so far away from the unfolding and ever-worsening events in Japan. Save for CNN and BBC World’s rolling coverage and some intense print media material in The Straits Times, it seemed almost as though the drama might be happening on another planet.
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