economonkey

The head of the Financial Services Authority, Lord Turner, seems to be taking a harder line with the banking industry, and we’re loving his newfound bad-assery. Turner’s bank-slapping comments were published as part of a rountable discussion on stabilising the global finance industry, which you can read at Prospect Magazine’s website (subscription required).
In the article, [...]

Is anybody really surprised to hear about the Chelsea Building Society’s £41million of losses to mortgage fraud? It’s hilarious that the building society is painting itself as an innocent victim, claiming that the fraudulent loans were acquired by syndicates of unscrupulous buy-to-let landlords running a scam with crooked mortgage brokers and surveyors. As if Chelsea, [...]

KPMG, the professional services company which helps obscenely wealthy clients find clever (and sometimes illegal) ways to avoid paying their taxes, claims that governments are planning to increase taxes on the rich in order to pay for economic stimulus packages.
In a bleating press release today, the company said that although the overage worldwide top-rate of [...]

I promise that I had no idea about this story yesterday, when I wrote my previous post about why the recent increases in house prices were based on very low volume and would not last very long at all. As if by magic, today we see a report from leading property website, Rightmove, which claims [...]

In our opinion, no. You’ve no doubt read stories about prices rising over the past few months, so you might be forgiven for assuming this means the worst of the housing market downturn is over and we’re getting back to business as usual. We don’t think that’s true.
The most important thing to understand about this [...]