The Chancellor may welcome future Chinese investment in the UK, but back home the present-day reality of his cuts to the green economy is beginning to bite uncomfortably hard. The CBI speaks of the government “watering down” its green commitments, while the government’s advisers, the Committee on…Read more…

As we all know George Osborne came into office promising to rebalance the economy, and to reduce reliance on public and private debts. With no progress on the former and only very limited gains on the latter, one area of severe deterioration has been the UK’s financial relations with the rest of…Read more…

There was a significant exchange last week (Tuesday 8 September) ago in the House of Lords Treasury Select Committee. Sir Andrew Turnbull, head of the Civil Service (2002-2005), head of the Treasury (1998-2002) challenged the Chancellor on the real pur…Read more…

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…

(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…

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…

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…

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…

 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…

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 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…

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…

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…

“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…

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…