So, that was it. The worst recession in living memory is, if you believe the latest government think tank reports, now over. The recession that Alistair Darling said would be the worst for 60 years (and he recently revised that estimate upwards to 100 years) has passed with nary a whimper in real terms.
True, if [...]
It wasn’t so long ago that we saw UK banks advertising highest rates of up to 10% on their savings accounts – that almost rivalled the long term average rate of return offered by investing in the stock market, but with none of the associated risk. Those days seem far behind us now, with the [...]
The stated purpose of the wide-ranging, privacy-destroying, state-interventionist ‘War Against Terror’ legislation is to protect our way of life and ensure that anyone threatening the peace and stability of either the UK or the US is swiftly and ruthlessly dealt with.
Yet what the UK, the US and other countries currently face has an even greater [...]
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? [...]