Recession can still be averted
Recession can be averted by an infrastructure and public works programme.
Brown proposes £12bn credit crunch business fund
Gordon Brown will propose a £12bn fund to help small businesses survive the credit crunch at a meeting of fellow European leaders today on how to tackle the problems currently crippling the financial markets. Speaking at Downing Street before his departure for Paris, Brown said: “We are seeing, in addition to the national action we are taking, that these global problems about oil, about the...
Forthcoming Investment Opportunities
The present gloomy state of the property market is a good time to take stock and ponder how best to take advantage of the investment opportunities that will start to open up as the cycle bottoms-out before the next upswing.
Cameron is the man with a plan
Speaking at the Conservative Conference, David Cameron claimed to be “a man with a plan”. He is not. Neither party has given any indication that they are capable of coming up with any policies that would be better than letting events take their course, which should lead to a natural recovery from about 2015, though the Japanese problems have taken much longer and still there is trouble...
Western world will become significantly less wealthy
Western world will become significantly less wealthy – so says the Daily Telegraph economics editor in this article. This is true. But it has not happened yet. Billions dollars and pounds have been lost in paper values, but that is not a loss in wealth.
The loss in wealth will occur because land prices had advanced well beyond the actual earning capacity of land, based on the capitalisation...
What is going on in the economy?
Confused about what is going on?
It’s because of their red braces
The dissection of the economic crises gathers pace with a flood of articles on the web sites of the press. It is, apparently, all caused by greedy traders in the City and Wall Street. The ones with red braces. Nice idea to blame these unlovely people and easy to do but…
Millennium goals being missed
The world’s leaders are gathering at the UN in New York this week to review progress towards the millennium development goals set in 2000. New figures released by the World Bank reveal that 1.4 billion people are now living in _blank”extreme poverty, or a quarter of the entire population of the developing world. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has singled out rich countries for failing...
Irish property crash leads euroland slump
Ireland has become the first country in the eurozone to slide into recession as the housing boom turns to slump. The economy shrank by 0.5pc in the second quarter, and 0.3pc in the first quarter. Other EU states to follow include Denmark, already in recession and Sweden, not members of EMU, followed by Italy, Ireland and Spain, which has been in trouble for a while. In Ireland, house prices have...
UK property sales drop to 50 year low
Butterfly economics
An article in today’s Guardian refers to RICS figures which show that house sales have dropped to their lowest level since 1959. In the absence of land value taxation, house prices are sticky downwards, but due to the interaction of the banking system and the land market, they always overshoot when the trend is rising. This drives the boom-bust cycle. When the country’s...