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Nevill Boyd Maunsell

Sunshine shoppers stun the experts

A burst of sunshine in May brought hitherto reluctant shoppers out in force, causing the biggest one-month jump in retail sales since records began in 1986. Read

Tanker drivers' wages windfall will fuel better pay demands

“Peculiar to the circumstances” was the phrase Chancellor Darling used of the Shell tanker drivers’ double-digit pay deal when he went on the BBC’s Today programme on Wednesday to urge everyone else to tread lightly with their wage claims. Read

Darling announces Bank of England shake up

The top jobs at the Bank of England are to be advertised in future as well as vacancies for outsiders on the Bank’s interest-setting monetary policy committee. Read

Manufacturers confident rising prices will benefit customers

Britain’s industrialists remain overwhelmingly confident that they will be able to pass on to their customers the fast-rising prices they face for energy and raw materials. Read

Bank to put interest rates on hold in fight against inflation

Mervyn King has set the stock market ablaze with what has been interpreted as an indication the Bank may not raise interest rates this year. Read

CBI disagrees with City and forecasts inflation fall in 2009

The CBI is challenging the City’s view that the Bank of England will have to raise interest rates later this year to contain inflation and predicts that fast-falling inflation will enable the Bank of England to start cutting the cost of borrowing next year. Read

Rising prices bring a new kind of shock

Once upon a time, in the dim, distant past, serious people could be shocked by shocking trade figures. Read

Lenders agree to clamp down on mortgage scams

Mortgage lenders, housebuilders and estate agents have agreed new rules intended to stamp out a scam where buyers of newly built homes have obtained mortgages based on far bigger prices than they actually pay. Read

Survey shows house prices still rising year-on-year

A remarkably stable picture of the housing market has come from the Department of Communities and Local Government. Read

Bank says liquidity schemes set to become commonplace

A 'backstop' like The Bank of England's special liquidity scheme, set up to make up to £100 billion available to banks could become a permanent feature of British banking. Read

Shareholders seem happy to back the begging banks

There is not a lot of money around.  That, it is said, is why the housing market has seized solid. Read

Housing market problems transfer wealth back to less well off

For more than a decade we have lived in a world where house prices rose relentlessly, while the prices of everything else did nothing much. Now the opposite is happening. Read

Even if plan to save mortgage strugglers works it will be cocked up

In 1992, I think it was, when the housing market was in a far worse mess than today, a gentleman was discovered living rather grandly in the kind of pad that would nowadays belong to a Russian oligarch, while humbler taxpayers were paying the interest on his £1 million mortgage. Read

So, when is an insurance premium not an insurance premium

Horror of horrors. Imagine the agony, the recriminations, the ruined reputations, if Bradford & Bingley had stuck to its guns and pressed ahead with its rights issue at 83p, the price it originally thought of, and watched as its existing shares sank beneath it. Read

Royal Bank of Scotland's issue has done shares no good

If you have the misfortune to own shares in The Royal Bank of Scotland, today you have the opportunity to win back a little cash as a consolation for the prospect of getting none for this year's interim dividend. Read

Bank of England paints a gloomy picture

Bank of England governor Mervyn King has admitted the UK is in for a tough year financially Read

Mervyn King refused to be sidetracked - just as expected

You read it here yesterday. Read

Government facing tough choices on inflation

Chancellor Alistair Darling has been urged to abandon the Bank of England's two per cent inflation target after official numbers showed rocketing gas and electricity bills drove the cost of living ahead three per cent over the 12 months to April, up from a seemingly reassuring 2.5 in February and March. Read

Stop dithering Chancellor, it's time to put the squeeze on

NBM:The time has come for Alistair Darling to stop dithering like his leader and act like the wimp Britain needs. Read

The biggest political backlash since Thatcher's poll tax

As the 10p income tax fiasco has demonstrated for Gordon, there is more than elementary arithmetic to being Chancellor of the Exchequer. Read

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Nevill is The Birmingham Post's economics editor and based in the newspaper's London office.

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