My personal highlight of the Her Majesty’s now unprecedented reign was the celebrated visit to the London School of Economics on 6 November 2008. So let’s commemorate the occasion by reproducing Hello magazine’s (yep!) account of the event. The visit came at the absolute epicentre of the crisis,…Read more…
Twice as many €-millionaire bankers in UK as the rest of Europe put together. Doing what for the rest of us?
(I missed this data release on Monday, but today the FT remind us of the results with a chart on their front page.) In 2013 the UK has 2,086 high-earning bankers (defined as earning more than one million euros a year, £850,000), according to a new report published by the European Bankers…Read more…
Britain in the red: Households with problem debt up by more than a quarter since 2012
Today saw the first release of findings by the Centre for Responsible Credit (CfRC) from the joint TUC and Unison commissioned ‘Britain in the Red’ project. The project is looking at available aggregate and household survey data to track the extent of household over-indebtedness: assessing the…Read more…
More bad news on UK manufacturing
Today the EEF (Engineering Employers’ Federation) affirmed the weakness of the UK manufacturing sector, halving their forecast for manufacturing growth in 2015 to 0.7 per cent. The chart below of ONS figures shows manufacturing proceeding since the 1990s in a series of fits and starts. Over the…Read more…
ONS show just how hard ‘well-being’ is hit by low incomes and wealth
The ONS report ‘Relationship between Wealth, Income and Personal Well-being, July 2011 to June 2012’ may not be hugely surprising , but vividly shows the how dependent personal well-being is on a decent standard of living. For the ONS, well being has four aspects, ‘life satisfaction’, ‘sense of…Read more…
Q1. Is Canada in recession because of China? Q2. Will their newly-published ‘Federal Balanced Budget Act’ help?
Yesterday, as market volatility continued, GDP figures were issued showing Canada now in ‘technical’ recession. It was a close call, with quarterly growth in 2015 Q2 at -0.1 per cent, following a fall of -0.2 in Q1. But few seem in doubt that conditions in this G8 economy are a worry. The chart…Read more…
The largest one-day fall on FTSE since 2009 in its historical context
Yesterday global stock exchanges had their worse day for many years, for some unmatched since the financial crisis of 2008. The FTSE fell by 4.55%, the largest daily fall since 2 March 2009 (when down 5.3%); when markets shut the index was at 5899, its lowest ‘close’ for almost three…Read more…
“There are growing fears about the health of the global economy”, headlines BBC News at Ten
Yesterday (20 August) Robert Peston’s report on the growing crisis in emerging market economies was given top billing on the BBC News at Ten (you might still be able to catch it here). Motivated mainly by the slowdown in China, and covering an array of stock market, exchange rate and other economic…Read more…
Yesterday’s ‘core’ inflation figures are misleadingly strong, driven by erratic items
Yesterday the ONS reported headline CPI inflation in July 2015 at 0.1%, marginally higher than last month’s zero and market expectation of no change. But subsequent attention has focussed heavily on the rise in core inflation to 1.2%from 0.8%. As we have often argued, core figures are likely…Read more…
Tory Party March & Rally, October 4th
Sunday 4 October – “No to austerity, yes to workers’ rights” On Sunday 4 October, the Conservative party will open their annual conference in Manchester. After five years of austerity, falling…Read more…
What should China do now?
Global markets are understandably jittery at what has become the biggest fall in the remnibi, China’s currency, since the 1990s. Duncan Weldon explained what is going on with his customary clarity on last night’s Newsnight programme. In a nutshell, between the reforms of the late 1970s and the…Read more…
What if Mao still ran China?
I’ve always been a sucker for those ‘What if?’ historical scenarios. What if John Smith hadn’t died in 1994? Would New Labour ever have happened? How would social democracy look today in the UK? Or: What if Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro had not been kidnapped and killed by terrorists in 1978?…Read more…
The Global Money Addiction (interest rate dilemmas in context)
“Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money”, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his inaugural address, 4 March 1933 Debate around UK monetary policy recognises all is far from normal through the idea that when rate rises finally come, they will be limited in extent….Read more…
What sort of industrial policy do we really need? Part One.
By David Bailey, Phil Tomlinson and Keith Cowling It seems that the new BIS Secretary Sajid Javid is undertaking a ‘fundamental review’ of the government’s industrial policy as he wonders what a…Read more…
What sort of industrial policy do we really need? Part Two.
By David Bailey, Phil Tomlinson and Keith Cowling The last coalition government’s record in relation to industrial policy has been mixed. George Osborne made promising noises in the early days about…Read more…
Monetary policy committee minutes betray worries about the economy?
In spite of fevered speculation about rate rises in the not too distant future, only one member of the MPC voted for interest rate rises (Ian McCafferty of the CBI). The minutes betray some concerns about the underlying momentum of the economy going forward. On GDP the Committee note that…Read more…
Still easily the slowest recovery of GDP per head on record
In the coverage of the GDP figures last week, some attention was paid to the ONS observation that on a per head basis GDP in 2015 Q2 is likely to be back to the pre-crisis level. This may be all well and good, but is hardly a measure of economic performance. The relevant measure is…
The post…Read more…
Bank of England lending data echoes reliance on consumer demand, with corporate borrowing falling again
Bank of England lending data issued earlier this week (here) showed a reduction in the pace of growth of lending to the private sector for the third month in a row. But as lending to financial and non-financial firms fell, lending to households expanded. Lending growth, month on a year ago As the…Read more…
TUC Economic Quarterly Report 7
This quarterly TUC report provides an analysis of UK economic developments over recent months; focuses on the current labour market compared to pre-recession levels; and includes a spotlight feature on productivity since 2008. Summary Economic activity appears to have weakened a little from the…Read more…
Revival in GDP quarterly growth figure disguises increased imbalances
GDP quarterly growth was back up to 0.7% in 2015 Q2 from 0.4% in Q1, and was in-line with market expectations. The main reasons for the revival in growth were a surge in energy extraction and use and a rebound in service activity. Acting in the opposite direction was the first fall in manufacturing…Read more…