economonkey

Secret bank loans kept RBS and HBOS alive

Lance — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:00:32 +0000

Mervy King has revealed, for the first time, that last autumn the Bank of England provided up to £62 billion in short term loans to RBS and HBOS in almost complete secrecy. This just goes to show how dire the situation was, and certainly reinforces the argument for a radical shake-up of banking regulations. If [...]

Bailed-out banks to be broken up, retail banking competitors encouraged

Lance — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:18:50 +0000

This BBC article does a good job of explaining what the government is planning to do with all the banks that it bought huge shares in with taxpayer money over the past year or so. The long and short of it seems to be that the existing big-name high street banks are to be broken [...]

The bank bailout, we’re finally paying the true price

Lance — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:22:08 +0000

Noticed how all of a sudden the politicians are bending over backwards to convince the public that they’re prepared to make even more severe spending cuts than their rivals? The political agenda seems to have flipped overnight from ‘doing what’s necessary to get economic growth back on track’ to ‘reigning in public spending to face [...]

FSA threatens to tax the bejeezus out of banks

Lance — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:49:40 +0000

The head of the Financial Services Authority, Lord Turner, seems to be taking a harder line with the banking industry, and we’re loving his newfound bad-assery. Turner’s bank-slapping comments were published as part of a rountable discussion on stabilising the global finance industry, which you can read at Prospect Magazine’s website (subscription required). In the article, [...]

Building society blames losses on mortgage fraud, not greed and incompetence

Lance — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:35:14 +0000

Is anybody really surprised to hear about the Chelsea Building Society’s £41million of losses to mortgage fraud? It’s hilarious that the building society is painting itself as an innocent victim, claiming that the fraudulent loans were acquired by syndicates of unscrupulous buy-to-let landlords running a scam with crooked mortgage brokers and surveyors. As if Chelsea, [...]

High earners will foot the bill for bailouts and stimulus packages, says KPMG

Lance — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:54:30 +0000

KPMG, the professional services company which helps obscenely wealthy clients find clever (and sometimes illegal) ways to avoid paying their taxes, claims that governments are planning to increase taxes on the rich in order to pay for economic stimulus packages. In a bleating press release today, the company said that although the overage worldwide top-rate of [...]

House prices continue to slide

Lance — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:00:54 +0000

I promise that I had no idea about this story yesterday, when I wrote my previous post about why the recent increases in house prices were based on very low volume and would not last very long at all. As if by magic, today we see a report from leading property website, Rightmove, which claims [...]

Is the property market crash over?

Lance — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:40:26 +0000

In our opinion, no. You’ve no doubt read stories about prices rising over the past few months, so you might be forgiven for assuming this means the worst of the housing market downturn is over and we’re getting back to business as usual. We don’t think that’s true. The most important thing to understand about this [...]

It was all just a bad dream

Alex — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:30:30 +0000

So, that was it. The worst recession in living memory is, if you believe the latest government think tank reports, now over. The recession that Alistair Darling said would be the worst for 60 years (and he recently revised that estimate upwards to 100 years) has passed with nary a whimper in real terms. True, if [...]

Did the Daily Telegraph just bring down the British government?

Lance — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:41:44 +0000

You’ve got to hand it to the Telegraph, the famously right-leaning broadsheet has played its hand brilliantly over the past fortnight. The expenses scandal was a great story and they could have blown their wad all in one go, after all, the receipts were due to be released to the general public under the Freedom [...]