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Days before the 2001 election, polls showed Michael  Bloomberg  trailing a seasoned opponent by double-digits. Dismissed as a billionaire trying to buy his way into office, the first-time candidate’s style was charitably described as “low-key” — and less charitably as detached or “dry as toast”. Yet he prevailed to become New York City’s mayor. “Nobody believed we would do this tonight, but we had faith,” he said as supporters basked in victory. That formative political experience — and a battery of data and opinion research — have kindled a similar faith among  Bloomberg  loyalists this week as he joined the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. But at a time when progressive ideas are on the ascendant, some derided the announcement as a misguided vanity project for a 77-year-old media baron who ran in New York as a moderate Republican. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has put taxing billionaires at the centre of her candidacy, welcomed Mr  Bl...

PM vows to relax state aid rules after EU split Pledge to diverge from Brussels regime threatens to hamper trade deal talks SEBASTIAN PAYNE AND CHRIS GILES LONDON JIM BRUNSDEN — BRUSSELS Boris Johnson has pledged that the UK will break free of EU state aid rules after Brexit to make it easier to prop up ailing industries, in a move that is aimed at winning over Labour voters but could make it harder to secure a trade deal with Brussels. The prime minister set out proposals yesterday to make it “faster and easier” for a government to intervene in failing industries after the UK leaves the EU, with officials saying it would allow “extremely rapid responses to economic turbulence”. Mr Johnson’s assertion that Brexit would allow Britain to adopt looser state aid rules marks an abrupt change for a politician who has spent most of career — in politics and journalism — fulminating against supposed statist tendencies in Brussels. It also dismayed rightwingers who argue that le...

It was 1986, and one of the most popular television shows was Dallas, about the oil tycoon J. R. Ewing and that most Texan of dreams, to get rich through scheming. At a Beverly Hills conference for Wall Street financiers, the actor Larry Hagman, who played J. R., riffed on a popular commercial for the American Express credit card, speaking instead of his “Drexel Express titanium card,” named after the most powerful investment bank of those days, Drexel Burnham Lambert. The card, he said, “has a ten-billion-dollar line of credit… don’t go hunting without it.” The men in the audience admired J. R.’s daring, wealth, scheming, and most of all, perhaps, his use of borrowed money to ruthlessly capture or crush rival corporations. This was anything but Wright Patman’s Texas, which traced back to the late nineteenth century and the Farmers’ Alliance demands for low interest rates and fair markets. J. R.’s Texas culture was formed in the 1940s, with billionaire financiers in short sleeves play...

In 1985, the Dow Jones average jumped 27.66 percent. Making money in stocks, as a journalist put it, “was easy.” With lower interest rates, low inflation, and “takeover fever,” investors could throw a dart at a list of stocks and profit.2 The next year was also very good. The average gain of a Big Board stock in 1986 was 14 percent, with equity market indexes closing at a record high.3 For the top performers, the amounts of money involved were staggering. In 1987, Michael Milken awarded himself $550 million in compensation. In New York City, spending by bankers—a million dollars for curtains for a Fifth Avenue apartment, a thousand dollars for a vase of precious roses for a party—was obscene. A major financier announced in the Hamptons one night that “if you have less than seven hundred fifty million, you have no hedge against inflation.” In Paris, a jeweler “dazzled his society guests when topless models displayed the merchandise between courses.” In west Los Angeles, the average pri...