BRITISH CONCERNS ABOUT BP ISSUE GROW - The US official in charge of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has asked BP's chairman to meet President Barack Obama on June 16.
This follows the revelation that John Napier, chairman of British insurer Royal Sun Alliance, had written an open letter asking the US President to act in a more statesmanlike way.
Mr Napier said he had not 'had a pop' at President Obama, but had just put on record his concerns about the tone that had developed about the BP issue.
London mayor Boris Johnson had complained about anti-British rhetoric from the US.
Justin Urquhart-Stewart of Seven Investment Managers in London said the BP issue has now moved beyond the corporate and into the political world. He said all BP could do was be seen to be doing the right thing.
The analyst said there had been huge drops in BP shares, and it was too early to say what its final losses would be. He said that in the short term, BP may have to suspend or cut its dividend, but it could afford the costs and would survive. He said BP was still a strong, international, profitable business.
The analyst said other oil companies were 'absolutely terrified' by the implications of the disaster.
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FINANCIAL FIRMS TRY THEIR HAND AT WORLD CUP FORECASTS - Financial experts have been coming up with complicated prediction models to try to predict who will win the World Cup.
Tracy Alloway of the Financial Times' blog Alphaville said four investment banks had made serious efforts to predict the winner. She said this made sense, as many of the analysts tended to be young males, as were many of their clients, and maths-based analysis suited football because of all of its statistics.
Ms Alloway said UBS and Dankse Bank had forecast that Brazil would win, JPMorgan had gone for England, while Goldman Sachs said England, Argentina, Brazil and Spain would reach the semi-finals.
She said there was an element of PR in the attempts, and there were big question marks over the mathematics used in the models. She said JPMorgan had built a model for penalty shoot-outs, which had England ahead of Germany.
Ms Alloway said these type of financial models did not fare well during the financial crisis, and did not fare well when the unexpected happened.
