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 […]
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 […]
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 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? […]
With all the coverage of the temporary suspension of stamp duty (and if you’re currently marketing your house at £200k, get ready for offers below £175k), another jewel in the disjointed mish-mash of government announcements has been ignored by many commentators.
The Beeb caught it, though: “Other measures aimed at boosting the housing market include […]
“Economy at 60-year low, says Darling. And it will get worse.” So says The Guardian which also quotes the Chancellor as commenting, “People are pissed off with us.”
Quite.
The penny at last seems to have dropped, with Alistair Darling stating that the economic times faced by Britain and the rest of the world “are arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years […]