economonkey

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 [...]

This is an article that I could have written a few months ago, when the Bank of England stated its intention to begin ‘queasing’. But it has become rather more relevant now that one of the pronouncements of the G20 summit is that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will itself begin to ‘print’ additional SDRs (Special Drawing Rights, effectively the IMF’s own currency) which its contributor countries can draw down in the shape of dollars, euros, etc.

Note my use of the word ‘print’ in the above paragraph. The days when first world countries used the printing press to increase the volume of money in circulation have long gone, assigned to eras such as Weimar Germany. Paper and ink are still heavily in use in Zimbabwe, of course, but for countries like the UK, where the notes and coins in circulation account for only about three percent of the total ‘money’ in the system, we’re really talking about digits on a computer screen.

Even so, while the phrase ‘quantitative easing’ sounds nice and strategic, in reality it has a similar effect to printing addition bank notes and throwing them out of the Bank of England’s window into the street.

To take a step back for a moment, let’s look at the main blunt instrument used by policy-makers to control the velocity of money and the rate of growth of an economy: interest rates. Set the base rate low, goes the received wisdom, and people will ‘invest’ their money rather than leaving it idle in a bank account earning nothing (or, depending on the level of true inflation, less than nothing). If the economy starts to run away from itself and bubbles form in a particular investment market, interest rates can be raised, increasing the appeal of saving and reducing the relative gains to be made by investing in speculative markets.

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 [...]

There’s been a noticable change in the noises coming from our politicians over the past few days. Up until recently, they seem to have been largely preoccupied with helping ’struggling homeowners’ (i.e. baling out the simpletons who bought houses they couldn’t afford) and ‘restoring confidence’ (i.e. convincing people it’s safe to keep digging themselves into [...]

I’ve been waiting to finish this article until the UK’s inflation figures were released. They show the CPI figure for November to be 4.1%, higher than predicted by the majority of economists. This figure is more than double the 2% target that the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee is supposed to aim for, yet [...]

I’ve written in a previous article about the various concepts involved in economic inflation and how it can affect the value of your money, your wages and the things you buy.

The opposite of inflation is deflation, which I’ll explain in this article before going on to discuss the probable and possible situations in the UK for the next few years. The ‘deflation versus inflation’ argument is more important in the UK today than it has been at any time in the last 30 years, so it’s worth thinking about in some depth.

So, deflation. If inflation is a general increase in prices and/or wages driven by the greater availability of money (whether ‘real’ money or debt), then deflation is a general decrease in prices and/or wages driven by the much reduced availability of money. This is widely considered to be a bad thing.

But isn’t a reduction in prices a good thing? At a simple level, yes it is. Your wages – assuming they aren’t cut at the same rate – go further, your savings buy more over time and there’s less of a ‘treadmill’ effect where people feel that they are working ever harder to chase money to buy the same purchases, as happens in inflationary environments.

But politicians and economists fear deflation for a good reason. Fundamentally it stops the economy dead in its tracks. Nobody will buy something today that they don’t really need if they know it’s going to be cheaper tomorrow. This applies to companies as much as to individuals, which means that investment stops, companies cut back their staffing levels and unemployment rises. We end up with a deflationary spiral that’s every bit as traumatic as a highly inflationary one.

Deflation also makes it harder to pay off the principle amount of any debts, because wages tend to go down in nominal terms but the amount owed remains the same. This, incidentally, is why some newspaper pundits are now calling for deliberate inflation in order to wipe out the value of many people’s (and the nation’s) ill-advised debts, though such pundits are ignoring several important points about the banking industry’s methods of counteracting inflation through charges and wider interest rate spreads.

Should we be surprised that the Bank of England took desperate action today, cutting interest rates by an astounding 1.5 percent down to 3 percent, the lowest level in over half a century? OK, so it’s a massive cut and far more than the 1% which even the most dovish of market watchers were calling [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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? [...]