The Bank of England's best economic tool is raising interest rates

International experience suggests that countries have to turn the dial up a lot on macroprudential policies in order to for them to be effective. Sweden had to increase the risk weights on mortgage lending fivefold in order to dampen the market, while Norway has pushed down its loan-to-value cap to 85pc from 90pc since introducing the limit in 2010.

But there is one tool the Bank could use to cool the market which would also provide a boost to millions of prudent Britons. It’s a tool that the Bank knows well: raise interest rates. Monetary policy is not untested. Time and time again, it has been used to address financial stability issues.

In the words of Jeremy Stein, which were recently quoted by outgoing deputy governor Charlie Bean, monetary policy may be a blunt tool for addressing financial stability risks, but it does have the virtue that it “gets in all of the cracks”. The Bank may have a brand new toolkit to play with, but sometimes the old tools are also the best tools.

Glencore last to have a woman on board

Hallelujah. Shout it from the rooftops. Glencore has finally appointed a woman to sit on its board for the first time. The Switzerland-based mining group has at last ended its status as the only remaining FTSE 100 company not to have a female director at the top table.

Welcome, Patrice Merrin, a Canadian mining veteran. Those in the gender diversity bean-counting community will be delighted. Piece by piece, slowly but surely, the make-up of Britain’s biggest companies is changing. The UK is a small step closer to having women make up one in four of all boardroom roles by 2015.

And yet, does it actually matter? Quite apart from the fact Glencore told The Telegraph well over a year ago it would hire a woman director just as soon as it merged with Xstrata – what’s taken them so long? – and most of us have long ago lost interest, there will be others who can’t understand what the big deal is anyway.

Does hiring a woman to a board really make any business difference? No company should hire a woman just for the sake of it. They should be appointed to the role, any role for that matter, on merit. But now that Ms Merrin is on board, what role, if any, could her gender play in the company’s fortunes?

Glencore chief executive Ivan Glasenberg has always made clear he doesn’t believe in tokenism and the evidence speaks for itself.

A recent report by Credit Suisse found that companies with at least some female board representation outperformed those with no women on the board in terms of share price performance.

Fortune 500 companies with the highest representation of women board directors attained significantly higher financial performance, on average, than those with the lowest representation of women board directors, according to Catalyst’s most recent report, The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women’s Representation on Boards.

Recent research by McKinsey, a leading consultancy, showed that gender-balanced boards are linked to a better stock price. And IBM’s Kenexa High Performance Institute showed last year that organisations with a strong “diversity and inclusion culture” halve employee turnover, quadruple workforce innovation and double customer engagement.

No pressure, then, Ms Merrin.

Google still has Apple biting at watch market

At Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco, the search giant unveiled a new look for Android and showed off the next stage of its plan to flood the world with smartwatches running the new “Android Wear” software. We might look back on this moment and say it’s the first time Google beat Apple on hardware.

Reviews from the showfloor suggest that LG’s watch is perhaps a little too minimalist – “drab” said one reviewer; the Samsung rival is praised; and the Motorola version is attracting superlatives from excitable critics. But none of these models has really been shown off in serious fashion; users weren’t allowed out of demo mode and those given the Moto360 weren’t even permitted to turn it over.

But the principle of the thing is becoming clear: smartwatches must show users the information they want before they know they need it – directions; boarding passes in airports; the time – and that plays to the strengths Google has established with Google Now, which already tries to do that on phones.

Furthermore – no surprise, this – smartwatches are never going to catch on unless they are watches that people want to wear. Utility is a small factor when it comes to convincing people of the clothes they should wear, and Google has clearly persuaded Motorola at least that they must design their watch to meet those higher standards. The fashionable qualities and the diversity on offer across the range of Android manufacturers gives them an innate advantage over Apple, but on past performance it would still be a brave commentator who would bet against Cupertino, the home of Apple.

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