economonkey

The Office of Fair Trading has announced that it will offer rewards of up to £100,000 to anybody who provides information that can show British businesses are involved in price fixing-cartels. Price fixing is illegal in the UK- last year British Airways was fined £121 million after being found guilty of making a secret agreement […]

According to this story in today’s Financial Times, a global survey of financial industry workers has found that New York is overtaking London as the world’s financial capital. The nationalisation of Northern Rock and government plans to clamp down on tax-breaks for wealthy foreigners were cited as the two main reasons for the city’s declining […]

1) Money = Freedom. End of story
You might not need money to be happy, but unless you feel like living off the grid and growing your own food (in which case, I say good for you) you’re always going to have bills to pay, so you need money to live. For most people this means […]

The headlines seem to be suffering from an attack of schizophrenia over the prospects for Britain’s property market today. Reuters reports that mortgage approvals were up in January, with 44,288 home loans being approved compared to 42,343 in the previous month. That might sound like good news, but since the figure is roughly a third […]

It sounds like a daft question, doesn’t it? Money is the notes and coins in your pocket, the numbers on your bank statement, the limit on your credit card. You use it to buy things. Simple as that.

However, as with many seemingly daft questions, this one is worth scrutinising more carefully. For instance, why are those particular notes and coins ‘worth’ something? Why can’t we make our own? Why do we need money in the first place? How do the electronic numbers in bank accounts become the ‘real’ notes and coins in our hands? All of these questions and more spring up when we ask what money is.

Not all the questions can be answered in one short article, but we can lay the groundwork here. We’ll start with a basic premise and work upwards. Here goes: money is a medium of exchange.

The Inland Revenue has begun a clamp-down on people who have not paid tax on money they’ve made from renting out or selling buy-to-let properties. It’s fairly obvious that a large portion of the hundreds of thousands of buy to let landlords won’t be paying tax on their rental income, or profits they’ve made from selling […]

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the entire banking system is on the verge of complete meltdown with all the grim news coming from the financial services industry these days, but apparently it’s not all bad. Lloyds TSB has brought some cheer to the sector with an upbeat annual report showing a 6% year on […]

It turns out that the plan to nationalise Northern Rock isn’t quite as straight forward as we were all led to believe. Although far from ideal, the government’s scheme to bring the bank into public ownership seemed like the best way to ensure that the country benefited from lending billions of pounds of taxpayers money […]

Mixed news from the Council of Mortgage Lenders this week. The organisation claims that UK mortgage lending increased by 11% to £26.5 billion in January, but the outlook for the coming months isn’t so good with lending volumes expected to drop. The director of the CML said this is due to “considerable uncertainty in the […]

You have to feel at least a twinge of sympathy for chancellor, Alastair Darling, because whatever course of action he chose to take with Northern Rock, he was going to have a hard time from the press. As it happens, here at Economonkey House we think he’s done the best he could, or at least, […]