Faisal Islam has left Channel 4 News. This is an archive of his blogs.
We have never seen this level of detail on a budget situation before. Much of what was implied or left out of the budget is stated in astonishing detail here. It is a total disaster for the Treasury and the government, but some will argue the Tories have taken a big risk with financial confidence…
A harp has just been wheeled past me in the foyer of a hotel in Liverpool. I have never seen a fully encased harp before. I really did not expect to see that form of aural delectation of our union bosses at their landmark dinner tonight with cabinet ministers. I note a rebellious mood here,…
GMB boss Paul Kenny tells a private meeting at the TUC conference that he warned Gordon Brown he would be finished as a political force if he followed the Conservative spending cuts agenda.
As TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber addresses the TUC conference with talk of “social costs of Tory recessions”, the Conservatives have already won the fight to shift the argument to the need for cuts.
So in the battle for the soul of economics, Nobel prize-winner Paul Krugman declares victory for the New Keynesians. In a 6,700 word article for the New York Times magazine, Krugman uses the experience of the last two crisis-ridden years not just to pin some of the blame on the Chicago school of free market…
London, the very source of the credit storm, is an entirely appropriate host for the G20 jamborees. This weekend it was the finance ministers and central bankers who whizzed through the City and the Treasury. I wonder if any of their chauffeurs took a detour past the offices of AIG-FP in Mayfair, home to what…
About two years ago I met one of the top British bankers and asked for an opinion on Brown/Darling vs Cameron/Osborne. I was shocked to hear his scepticism about the Tory business policy versus the government. To be clear, this was Brown at his absolute peak, still ahead in the polls, just before Northern Rock…
Size does matter to the G20 finance ministers. We know this in relation to the extent of the recovery. Some feel recovery has bedded down sufficiently to allow talk of ‘exit strategies’ from the extraordinary stimulus seen around the world. Others, including the chancellor, fear that “the biggest single risk to recovery is that people…
Lehman’s bankruptcy changed the world. It sent world economy into a precipitous decline that’s matched the Great Depression. It arguably changed the course of the US election. It was a violent economic event that will be debated for decades. Much of the mystery surrounds the events of the weekend of the 13th/ 14th September 2008,…
“David Cameron is the best thing we have left on this planet…the only hope left for a risk-conscious society,” was one of the more unexpected answers I got from Nassim Taleb. I was interviewing the Black Swan author for a report we are doing next week. But as a teaser I put a series of…
Forget the voices suggesting interest rates might creep up in the near future. This morning revealed the reality that the Bank of England nearly voted for even more creation of its funny money.
Like a Greek Oracle, Mervyn King has divined some encouraging signs at the quarterly Bank of England assessment of the UK economy. But the bulk of the statistical soothsaying was pretty bleak. The banking system is still in a bad way and it may take some years for it to be “weaned off very large…
The film on the backlash against Goldman Sachs is top of our most-viewed charts. To catch-up on the backstory read here, and it’s well worth seeing the film here, if only to see lightning burst out of the sky above Goldman’s new HQ in Manhattan. But the plot has thickened over the connections between the…
‘Grow your own veg’ is an oddly resonant message in uncertain economic times. I heard it first from my father, when he sent his youngest three children to help him tend to his Manchester Council allotment at Bradley Folds next to the River Mersey. Now I’d rather have been tending to a football than fetching…
A crisis of the motor industry; a crisis of the home industry; a credit crisis; and high petrol prices. Every expressway of the American Great Recession passes through Elkhart Indiana, capital of RV manufacturing (recreational vehicle: basically motorhomes and trailers). It’s totally devastating for places like Elkhart that we have just visited at the same…