economonkey

You might remember that about ten years ago, when the current government was elected, Gordon Brown made a big deal about his strict new rules for government borrowing which were all part of his ‘no more boom and bust’ promise. Anyway, now that we’ve come to the end of the biggest boom in British history […]

The Guardian reports on research from Aon Consulting which has found that the value of British workers’ pension pots has dropped by a third over the past year, thanks to the tumbling stock market. In fact, this story is all over the headlines today - which is hardly surprising because it’s a pretty good story […]

And that’s not just us being our usual gloomy selves - Charles Bean, deputy governor of the Bank of England, reckons that we’re now facing the worst financial crisis in human history. Just think about that for a second, possibly the worst financial crisis in human history and it’s not been caused by a world […]

The UK property market remains in freefall, with figures from Righmove.com showing the average price of a home in England and Wales has fallen by a shade under 5% over the past twelve months (although Halifax and Nationwide put that figure at 12%). According to the Council of Mortgage Lenders, UK mortgage lending has dropped […]

This is why it matters. While our government commits hundreds of billions of pounds to bail out a banking system that destroyed itself by pissing about enormous sums of cash like it was nothing more than monopoly money, there are 5.5 million children living in poverty in the UK. Many of the poorest live within […]

Gordon Brown’s rescue plan for the banking industry seems to have been used as a blueprint for similar bailouts across Europe and even in the US, and for now it seems like the stock markets are responding positively with record gains on most of the major markets. So everything’s peachy and happy days are here […]

Remember that 0.5% emergency interest rate cut last week? The one that was supposed to bring a bit of relief to homeowners and maybe get the mortgage market moving again? Remember that? We only ask because it looks like some of the big mortgage lenders certainly don’t remember it.
The Nationwide announced today that it was […]

It looks like Gordon Brown has convinced the rest of Europe to follow his master plan of bailing out the banks with massive capital injections (i.e. buying shares in the banks with taxpayer money) and measures to improve liquidity (i.e. guaranteeing the banks’ loans to each other with, you guessed it, taxpayer money). Given that […]

So, after the US government slashed interest rates to 2% and gave Wall Street a $500 billion taxpayer bailout, only to see all this achieve precisely jack shit as the American and international stock markets paused for a moment’s reflection before getting on with the business of falling off a cliff, guess what the UK […]

The US government managed to push through its $700 billion banking industry bailout plan on the second attempt but if anybody thought this was going to be the quick fix needed to nudge the global economy back on track, it looks like they wore sorely mistaken. The Guardian reports that Wall Street’s big banks are […]