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Nevill Boyd Maunsell

FSA goes missing as the mortgage train runs away

Just fancy that. Home-buyers most likely to default on their mortgages are those who have borrowed an abnormally high multiple of their income, those whose mortgages represent a high proportion of the value of their home and those with mortgages set to last more than 25 years. Read

King's head should not roll to even up a political score

Gordon Brown's second greatest triumph as Chancellor was to make the Bank of England the independent arbiter of interest rates. (The greatest was to keep us out of the euro, but he doesn't boast about that.) Read

Rock's small shareholders flex their muscles

Northern Rock's small shareholders yesterday voted down three out of four resolutions proposed by hedge funds that have bought 18 per cent of the shares in the stricken mortgage lender. Read

Quiet resignation at the unchanged rate

The Bank of England's decision to leave its official interest rate unchanged at 5.5 per cent was greeted with widespread resignation, coupled with confident predictions of a cut next month and the cost of borrowing falling perhaps as low as four per cent by next year. Read

Mixed messages over supposed UK economic slowdown

The Bank of England has said over and again that we must have an economic slowdown before it can be happy about chopping interest rates the way pretty well everybody says it will anyway. Read

Rose-coloured spectacles and the M&S shares kill

what do we make of newly-knighted Sir Stuart Rose's £1 million splurge on Marks & Spencer shares yesterday, supported by three other M&S directors pitching in with the best part of another £300,000? Read

Confidence dips but Britons still don't fear for their jobs

Although consumer confidence ebbed for the third month running in December, most Britons remain confident about their jobs, now and in the future, and have become perceptibly less reluctant to spend money. Read

Brown to pick a fight he may live to regret

Gordon Brown's "vision" - for lack of which last October we were denied a General Election, so he said - looks disturbingly deja vu. Read

Brown picks a fight he may live to regret

Gordon Brown's "vision" - for lack of which last October we were denied a General Election, so he said - looks disturbingly deja vu. Read

Arden returns £5.5m profit

Arden Partners, the Birmingham stockbroker that brought its shares to the AIM market in July 2006, yesterday reported underlying profits of £5.5 million up 18 per cent for the year to October, its first full year as a listed company. Read

Credit crunch is not all bad news

So it has taken just five months for the credit crunch to reach the credit card in your pocket. Read

Stock markets usually do fine in Olympic years

It was an elementary exercise in crystal-gazing to proclaim 2008 would be the year of $100 oil. Read

'Big five' become the hunted

Barclays was forced to bail out its conduits this year. The summer turmoil in financial markets created the toughest climate in years for the UK banking sector, taking the gloss off record profits for the "big five". Read

Graeme wins share tipping award with Tanfield

Graeme Cull, of Arden Partners, has won the magnum of champagne awarded by our sponsor Citigate to the winner of The Birmingham Post mid-winter share tipping exercise. Read

Good riddance to the year the wheels nearly came off

It was the year the wheels began falling off the bandwagon, in Britain, the year of Northern Rock. Read

Cash machine clues to Christmas spending

You might not guess it from the headlines, surveys, statistics and glum mutterings by some shopkeepers, but there is more money around than you might think. Read

It's not all doom and gloom for the banks

I am back from a break in Florida, where nobody talks about falling house prices any more. Read

Bank's battle over borrowing cost rate

The Bank of England is to pump money into the market over Christmas and the New Year and not claw it back until the second week in January. Read

Chambers call for winter drop in rates

The Bank of England's decision to leave its official interest rate unchanged at 5.75 per cent drew a mostly stoical response from the West Midlands Read

Forget about an interest cut until February

Short of something very like a catastrophe - Barclays turning out to be Britain's answer to Citigroup, say - you can forget about an interest rate cut until February. 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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