TEXT ONE Tesco is preparing a legal battle to clear its name of involvement in the dairy price-fixing scandal that has cost consumers £270 million. Failure to prove that it had no part in collusion with other supermarkets and dairy processors may land it with a fine of at least £80 million. The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) said yesterday that Asda, Sainsbury’s and the former Safeway, plus the dairy companies Wiseman, Dairy Crest and Cheese Company, had admitted being in a cartel to fix prices for milk, butter and cheese. They were fined a total of just over £116 million as part of a leniency deal offered by the watchdog to companies that owned up quickly to anti-competitive behaviour. Officials at the OFT admitted privately that they did not think they would ever discover which company or individual had initiated the pricing formula. But the watchdog recognises that at the time supermarkets were under pressure from politicians and farmers to raise the cost of milk to save dairy farming, though it is not certain that money found its way to farmers. The OFT claimed in September that it had found evidence that the retail chains had passed future milk prices to dairy companies, which then reached a fixed price among themselves.
The average cost to each household is thought to be £11.25 over 2002 and 2003. Prices went up an extra 3p on a pint of milk, 15p on a quarter of a pound of butter and 15p on a half pound of cheese. There is no direct recompense for consumers, however, and the money will go to the Treasury. The National Consumer Council gave warning that the admissions would dent consumer confidence in leading high street names and that people would become sceptical of their claims. Farmers For Action, the group of farmers that has led protests over low milk prices since 2000, is seeking legal advice on whether it can now bring a claim for compensation.
The OFT investigation is continuing, however, in relation to Tesco, Morrisons and the dairy group Lactalis McLelland, and any legal action is expected to be delayed until that is completed.
Tesco was defiant and said that it was preparing a robust defence of its actions. Lucy Neville-Rolfe, its executive director, said: “As we have always said, we acted independently and we did not collude with anyone. Our position is different from our competitors and we are defending our own case vigorously. Our philosophy is to give a good deal to customers.”
Morrisons has supported the OFT in inquiries into the former Safeway business that it took over, but in a statement said that it was still making “strong representations” in its defence. A spokeswoman for Lactalis McLelland said that the company was “co-operating” with the OFT. Industry insiders suggested that the three companies were deliberately stalling the OFT investigation.
Sainsbury’s admitted yesterday that it had agreed to pay £26 million in fines, but denied that it had sought to profiteer. Justin King, the chief executive, said he was disappointed that the company had been penalised for actions meant to help farmers but recognised the benefit of a speedy settlement. Asda declined to say how much it would pay in fines and also said that its intention had been to help farmers under severe financial pressure.
TEXT TWO
He emerged, all of a sudden, in 1957: the most explosive new poetic talent of the English post-war era. Poetry specialised, at that moment, in the wry chronicling of the everyday. The poetry of Yorkshire-born Ted Hughes, first published in a book called “The Hawk in the Rain” when he was 27, was unlike anything written by his immediate predecessors. Driven by an almost Jacobean rhetoric, it had a visionary fervour. Its most eye-catching characteristic was Hughes's ability to get beneath the skins of animals: foxes, otters, pigs. These animals were the real thing all right, but they were also armorial devices—symbols of the countryside and lifeblood of the earth in which they were rooted. It gave his work a raw, primal stink.
It was not only England that thought so either. Hughes's book was also published in America, where it won the Galbraith prize, a major literary award. But then, in 1963, Sylvia Plath, a young American poet whom he had first met at Cambridge University in 1956, and who became his wife in the summer of that year, committed suicide. Hughes was vilified for long after that, especially by feminists in America. In 1998, the year he died, Hughes broke his own self-imposed public silence about their relationship in a book of loose-weave poems called “Birthday Letters”. In this new and exhilarating collection of real letters, Hughes returns to the issue of his first wife's death, which he calls his “big and unmanageable event”. He felt his talent muffled by the perpetual eavesdropping upon his every move. Not until he decided to publish his own account of their relationship did the burden begin to lighten.
The analysis is raw, pained and ruthlessly self-aware. For all the moral torment, the writing itself has the same rush and vigour that possessed Hughes's early poetry. Some books of letters serve as a personalised historical chronicle. Poets' letters are seldom like that, and Hughes's are no exception. His are about a life of literary engagement: almost all of them include some musing on the state or the nature of writing, both Hughes's own or other people's. The trajectory of Hughes's literary career had him moving from obscurity to fame, and then, in the eyes of many, to life-long notoriety. These letters are filled with his wrestling with the consequences of being the part-private, part-public creature that he became, desperate to devote himself to his writing, and yet subject to endless invasions of his privacy.
Hughes is an absorbing and intricate commentator upon his own poetry, even when he is standing back from it and good-humouredly condemning himself for “its fantasticalia, its pretticisms and its infinite verballifications”. He also believed, from first to last, that poetry had a special place in the education of children. “What kids need”, he wrote in a 1988 letter to the secretary of state for education in the Conservative government, “is a headfull [sic] of songs that are not songs but blocks of refined and achieved and exemplary language.” When that happens, children have “the guardian angel installed behind the tongue”. Lucky readers, big or small.
TEXT THREE
Controled bleeding or cauterisation? That was the unappealing choice facing UBS, a Swiss bank which has been badly hurt by the carnage in America’s mortgage market. The bank opted for the latter. First it opened the wound, by announcing a hefty $10 billion write-down on its exposure to subprime-infected debt. UBS now expects a loss for the fourth quarter, which ends this month. Then came the hot iron: news of a series of measures to shore up the bank’s capital base, among them investments from sovereign-wealth funds in Singapore and the Middle East. Bad news had been expected. UBS’s third-quarter write-down of over SFr4 billionin October looked overly optimistic compared with more aggressive markdowns at other banks such as Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. Steep falls in the market value of subprime debt since the end of the third quarter made it certain that UBS would take more pain, given its sizeable exposure to toxic collateralised-debt obligations (CDOs). Analysts at Citigroup were predicting in November that write-downs of up to SFr14 billion were possible.
Why then did this new batch of red ink still come as a shock? The answer lies not in the scale of the overall loss, more in UBS’s decision to take the hit in one go. The bank’s mark-to-model approach to valuing its subprime-related holdings had been based on payments data from the underlying mortgage loans. Although these data show a worsening in credit quality, the deterioration is slower than mark-to-market valuations, which have the effect of instantly crystallising all expected future losses.
Thanks to this gradualist approach, UBS had been expected to take write-downs in managed increments of SFr2 billion-3 billion over a period of several quarters. It now appears that the bank has incorporated market values into its model, sending its fourth-quarter write-downs into orbit. The change of approach may be on the advice of auditors and regulators but it is more likely to reflect a desire by UBS’s bosses to avoid months of speculation about the bank’s exposure, something that Marcel Rohner, the chief executive, described as “distracting”. In a particular indignity for a bank long associated with conservatism, concerns about the level of UBS’s capital ratio had even started to surface. Hence the moves to strengthen its tier-one capital, an important measure of bank solidity, by SFr19.4 billion, a great deal more than the write-down. The majority of that money will come from sovereign-wealth funds, the white knights of choice for today’s bank in distress. Singapore’s GIC, which manages the city-state’s foreign reserves, has pledged to buy SFr11 billion-worth of convertible bonds in UBS; an unnamed Middle Eastern investor will put in a further SFr2 billion. UBS will also raise money by selling treasury shares, and save cash by issuing its 2007 dividend in the form of shares. Its capital ratio is expected to end up above 12% in the fourth quarter, a strong position.
Hopeful talk of lines being drawn under the subprime crisis has been a feature of banks’ quarterly reporting since September. Marrying bigger-than-expected write-downs with bigger-than-expected boosts to capital looks like the right treatment in this environment. But UBS still cannot be sure that its problems are over. Further deterioration in its subprime asset values is possible; the broader economic impact of the credit crunch is unclear; and the damage to the bank’s reputation cannot yet be quantified. The patient still needs watching.
TEXT FOUR
Just as Norman Mailer, John Updike and Philip Roth were at various times regarded as the greatest American novelist since the second world war, John Ashbery and Robert Lowell vied for the title of greatest American poet. Yet the two men could not be more different. Lowell was a public figure who engaged with politics—in 1967 he marched shoulder-to-shoulder with Mailer in protest against the Vietnam war, as described in Mailer's novel “The Armies of the Night”. Lowell took on substantial themes and envisioned himself as a tragic, heroic figure, fighting against his own demons. Mr Ashbery's verse, by contrast, is more beguilingly casual. In his hands, the making of a poem can feel like the tumbling of dice on a table top. Visible on the page is a delicately playful strewing of words, looking to engage with each other in a shyly puzzled fashion. And there is an element of Dada-like play in his unpredictability of address with its perpetual shifting of tones.
Lowell, who died in 1977 at the age of 60, addressed the world head on. By contrast, Mr. Ashbery, who celebrated his 80th birthday earlier this year, glances wryly at the world and its absurdities. In this edition of his later poems, a substantial gathering of verses selected from six volumes published over the past 20 years, his poetry does not so much consist of themes to be explored as comic routines to be improvised. He mocks the very idea of the gravity of poetry itself. His tone can be alarmingly inconsequential, as if the reader is there to be perpetually wrong-footed. He shifts easily from the elevated to the work-a-day. His poems are endlessly digressive and there are often echoes of other poets in his writings, though these always come lightly at the reader, as though they were scents on the breeze.
Lowell wrote in strict formal measures; some of his last books consisted of entire sequences of sonnets. Mr. Ashbery can also be partial to particular forms of verse, though these tend to be of a fairly eccentric kind—the cento (a patchwork of other poets' works), for example, and the pantoum (a Malaysian form, said to have been introduced to 19th-century Europe by Victor Hugo). Often he writes in a free-flowing, conversational manner that depends for its success upon the fact that the ending of lines is untrammeled by any concern about whether or not they scan. Within many of his poems, there often seems to be a gently humorous antagonism between one stanza and the next. Mr. Ashbery likes using similes in his poetry. This is often the poet's stock-in-trade, but he seems to single them out in order to send up the very idea of the simile in poetry, as in “Violets blossomed loudly/ like a swear word in an empty tank”.
Life, for Lowell, was a serious matter, just as he was a serious man. Mr Ashbery's approach, as evinced by his poetry, is more that of a gentle shrug of amused bewilderment. Unlike Lowell's, his poems are neither autobiographical nor confessional. He doesn't take himself that seriously. “Is all of life a tepid housewarming?” For a poet this is a tougher question to answer than you might think.
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