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Why the City needs to work on its image
Financiers in the City and on Wall Street have never been the most popular people, but we all put up with them because we believed that they expanded the economy by adding value to businesses. And by spending their huge bonuses, of course.

But this consensus, if such it was, began to fray last year as mortgage rates began to rise just as the private equity boys found themselves in the spotlight for earning staggering amounts of money and paying staggeringly little tax.

Their only answer was to say that they were good at what they were doing, and added value to businesses, etc. etc.

Just a few months on the activities of these wizards and their peers in investment banks and, worst of all, some clearing banks have brought the financial world almost to its knees -- but, for the most part, they're not the ones to suffer.

We are, through credit tightening and all the rest of it. And we're out to get them, or rather some of our elected representatives are.

The first sign of this was chancellor Alistair Darling's bungled attempts to tax non-domiciles (initially a response to the private equity brouhaha) and introduce a standard rate of capital gains tax.

As it happened he missed the target both times, setting out to tax "ordinary" immigrant workers as well as fat cats and penalising the owners of small businesses on capital gains.

On the latter, he scored the most spectacular of own goals, reducing capital gains tax on the sale of second homes from 40% to 18%, thereby making them even more juicy investments at a time when his boss Gordon Brown is threatening to legislate to keep bankers out of the countryside. You couldn't make it up.

Now we have various EU members, led by Germany, threatening to dismember the likes of Lichtenstein if they don't cut down on tax dodging, a move Brown has always opposed, until now.

Because if the City (and its peer groups elsewhere) isn't working, why shouldn't everyone else (many of whom are non-doms or who reside officially in tax havens) pay tax like the rest of us?

Yesterday, the Financial Services Authority announced it was to spend £2m on a campaign advising us how to cope with the rapidly increasing threat of mortgage repossessions (note, I haven't even mentioned Northern Rock yet).

In the States, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who's been leaning over backwards to help Wall Street by cutting interest rates, pointedly remarked that banks could and should do much more to help homeowners who can't pay their mortgages over there.

If the FSA's prepared to dip into its pocket (well actually our pocket as it's mostly funded by the taxpayer) to try to clean up the mess, then the great and good of the City might be advised to hire a clever agency to explain what they do and why we need it.

Because if the City fails to explain itself adequately, things could turn quite nasty.

Key media brands at the crossroads
In the last few months we've already lost one of the key components of the media aristocracy, Emap, to a combination of Bauer, Apax and Guardian Media Group, and now GCap Media (home of Capital Radio and Classic FM) and, even ITV, are on the block.

GCap chairman Richard Eyre is going to have to prise open the books for Charles Allen's Global Radio after Global raised its bid to 225p a share or £370m, which is more than the City thought he could afford.

We've yet to see details of Allen's financing, of course. He's backed by horse racing types John Magnier, JP McManus and Michael Tabor (Tabor's son Ashley is slated to run the putative radio giant) and, rich as they are, they're hardly likely to stump up the whole £370m.
This may still get GCap off the hook.

Back at ITV. Michael Grade was in characteristically bullish mode this morning even as he announced that ITV's profits had tumbled 35% to £188m.

ITV's viewing share is up, said Grade (it is if you include its digital channels, which are undoubtedly performing strongly) and advertisers are coming back.

So why have its profits fallen so far and so fast?

Again, the analysts will be poring over the small print. It may be that Grade is doing a "kitchen sink" job (although these are his second set of figures), hoping to announce a big profit "leap"next year.

But will the markets give him time?

In his 'Today Programme' interview. he sat very firmly on the notion of hiving off the company’s programming side to create a pure broadcaster.

Because if a bid does come this is exactly what would happen.

Is this the most important businessman in the world?
At the moment Cai Jinyong (or Jin-Yong, depending on your news supplier) isn't even the most important person in Goldman Sachs, but the appointment of the 33-year-old Chinese native to run Goldman's Chinese joint venture and also as head of its Chinese investment banking business is certainly significant.

Jinyong, who has degrees from Beijing and Boston, is already a Goldman partner. He's the first (mostly) home-grown Goldmanite to run the joint venture and there's no doubt that Goldman, like many other Western companies, sees China and its sphere of influence as where the money is coming from in the next few decades.

So, as economic power moves eastwards, Jinyong could indeed become the most important businessman in the world.

Stephen Foster is a former news editor of ±±¾©Èü³µpk10, former editor of Marketing Week and Evening Standard ad columnist. He is a partner in Editorial Partnership and writes the blog and Politics of the Media for Brand Republic.