Ackman’s cerulean eyes charm ‘Woodstock’ crowd
THERE’S never a good time to announce branch closures.
But Spanishowned TSB surely could have picked a better day to say it was shutting 36 more bank branches.
It came as MPs were grilling the City watchdog’s top brass about access to cash and banking hubs.
Treasury Select Committee member Therese Coffey bemoaned the fact the Felixstowe branch in her Suffolk Coastal constituency was going.
Not to be outdone, committee chair Harriett Baldwin noted TSB was also quitting the last branch in Tenbury Wells in her West Worcestershire bailiwick.
Oh dear. THG’s founder and boss Matt Moulding has a reputation for ranting about how tech firms are treated in the City. Among the targets of his ire have been short-sellers – hedge funds who bet a company’s share price will fall and, if it does, stand to make money. Whispers notes that shorts against THG have climbed to a one-year high. Could another tirade be on the way, perhaps?
WARREN Buffett, the 93year-old Oracle of Omaha, was surrounded by the usual hordes of well-wishers at the annual meeting of his Berkshire Hathaway fund – aka ‘Woodstock for capitalists’.
But also lauded was another sage attending the stadium event – Bill Ackman, the New York-based boss of the FTSE 100 investment trust Pershing Square.
Observers say that private and institutional investors were ‘mobbing’ Ackman, once described by Vanity Fair magazine as ‘tall, athletic, handsome with cerulean eyes’.
It seems that the Berkshire Hathaway crowd were thanking Ackman for his stand on various fronts, including his proIsrael stance, his questioning of male athletes competing in women’s events and his defence of free speech on US college campuses.
Ackman’s lucidly-argued posts on X are, for many, the voice of sanity and a good reason to invest in Pershing Square.
HEAR Duolingo and you probably think of how you keep meaning to brush up on your rusty French before the summer holidays with the help of the language learning app.
But a growing area for the US-listed business is offering English language tests. Duolingo says these are accepted by a host of schools and governments.
But buried in its results, it says a country’s ‘political decision to cap or reduce immigration, particularly international student immigration’, could knock this revenue stream.
With exactly this debate raging in the UK, Whispers wonders if Duolingo is facing an uphill battle.