economonkey

There’s so much big economic news breaking at the moment that it’s impossible to cover everything in any amount of detail - the whole Bradford and Bingley thing bears further discussion for a start (just how many failed banks is the UK government going to buy before the money runs out?) but events have overtaken […]

Speaking at the Labour Party conference in Manchester today the chancellor, Alistair Darling, said pretty much everything you’d expect to hear from the man in charge of the British economy during these worrying times - tighter regulation of the banking industry, measures to stop this kind of crisis happening again, protection for savers, support for […]

Henry Paulson is now arguably the most powerful man in the world - or will be if Congress passes his and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s new bill. If you read through the text of the planned $700bn bailout of the US financial system (which will take all the banks’ bad debts off their hands […]

Today the FTSE 100 experienced an amazing rise in value, over 8% in a single morning - something which is practically unheard of in the history of the stock exchange. What’s happened here? Just yesterday the entire global economy was collapsing into chaos, so what could possibly have enabled the stock market not just to […]

You all know the story by now - following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, HBOS (the UK’s biggest mortgage lender) took a hammering on the stock market, with its share value falling to below £1 from around £3.50 (compared to close to £10 this time last year) largely as a result of short selling by […]

Countries like the UK have come to be known as FIRE economies, because they consist largely of companies involved in Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. These markets were seen as far more sexy and productive than boring old manufacturing or farming.
Which, according to a certain viewpoint, is true: there’s a limit to how much stuff people really need, so once your manufacturing and food distribution processes are suitably efficient it seems wasteful to pour more resources - and people - into making and growing stuff […]

To anybody who’s been paying much attention to the international banking system over recent years, the spectacular failure of Lehman Brothers should come as no surprise. What is surprising, however, is that the US government didn’t step in to save the massive investment bank which, up until yesterday, most people would have imagined enjoyed the […]

To the surprise of nobody with more than a couple of economics brain cells to rub together, the bail-out / conservatorship / nationalisation by any other name of the US GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac offered only a temporary reprieve to the markets. Temporary, in this instance, meaning less than 48 hours.
The initial misplaced euphoria from unthinking investors […]

Once a month without fail the British press gets its knickers all in a twist over what the Bank of England’s decision on interest rates will be and what it will mean for us all. But is this monthly tweaking of rates by quarter of a percent in either direction really that important any more? […]

The Organisation for Economic Growth and Development this week released a report on the economic outlook for the G7 group of major industrialised nations and, would you believe it, the organisation expects the UK to fall into recession later this year.
The OECD’s crack team of economic ninjas says it expects the UK economy to shrink […]