The Brown Government entered the sub-prime crisis and everything that followed with debts amounting to “one of the largest structural budget deficits in the industrial world”. So said the scrupulously independent, painfully politically neutral Institute for Fiscal Studies yesterday.Read
This may sound odd but I have never borrowed money to buy a car. I did buy cars with borrowed money from time to time, when I had a mortgage, that is. I bought two when I was living on an overdraft that had nothing to do with cars – except that the cars extended the overdraft’s life.Read
Believe it or not, it is little more than four months since the CBI was talking about a “shallow” winter recession to be followed by a gradual recovery in the course of 2009. Read
Each day we get a new reason why the pound continues its effortless descent through some supposed psychological barrier that turns out to be no barrier at all.Read
Time was when German politicians lectured us about this and that so regularly that most of us ceased to be indignant. It was a matter of routine, one of the tiresome features of life in an unsatisfactory world.Read
Large industrial companies are starting to plan price cuts, for the first time since 2006, in an effort to boost their slim order books and the failure of British exports to respond to the fall in the value of the pound.Read
It used to be called demanding money with menaces, a middle-ranking offence somewhere between begging and fraud. The police rarely seem to bother with it nowadays, any more than they do with burglary.Read
Carillion’s shares jumped by 17 per cent in early dealings on Wednesday after a remarkably up-beat trading statement by the Wolverhampton property services company.Read
Further interest rate cuts by the Bank of England are unlikely to prevent Britain’s economy from sinking deeper into recession next year than chancellor Alistair Darling forecast in his pre-Budget report last month.Read
A 9.7 per cent slump in output of motor vehicles between September and October, along with a 6.7 per cent drop in vehicle bodies, engines and components, led to the steepest across-the-board decline in manufacturing for three and a half years.Read
News of the steepest ever monthly fall in house prices shortly before the Bank of England made its interest rate cut sent the pound into a fresh slide to touch $1.4467, its lowest level against the greenback for more than six years.Read
the West Midlands manufacturing industry has been harder hit than in any other part of the UK as the financial crisis infected the real economy this autumn.Read
A brutal, but brisk, recession is the prospect projected by the Bank of England in its latest quarterly “inflation Report” yesterday, coupled with a warning that the lack of historical parallels makes such predictions highly uncertain.Read
