Faisal Islam has left Channel 4 News. This is an archive of his blogs.
Rising out of the carnage of the credit storm is the new gleaming headquarters of the titan of post crisis American banking. Goldman Sachs has emerged richer and more powerful than ever, but the Goldman glow is being replaced by a Goldman glare. It has without doubt been the most significant shift I have noticed…
So I was in the East Room of the White House for what appears to have been a minor moment of US domestic history.. I was about five metres away from the president when he said that the Cambridge police ‘acted stupidly’ having mused on healthcare economics for an hour. This is what I, as stand-in…
“I think the banks have pulled one. They maybe didn’t plan on it, but looking back it’s quite an amazing steal… “The banks got an amazing deal last September, they were rescued by the taxpayer, and then refloated themselves giving the taxpayer very little of the upside and now they are going to have very…
America’s banks rake in bumper profits just six months after they were on the ropes, begging for government bailouts. Faisal Islam went to the US to find out what the legacy of the banking crisis is.
There are many men in dark glasses in Washington DC during the summer. Amongst the most feared have been the International Monetary Fund economists who fly around the world reviewing the policies of individual countries – so-called Article IV Consultations. Such a team has been in the UK over the past weeks and a few…
‘Hockney-esque’ is how the City minister, Lord Myners last week described today’s government effort to reboot Britain’s banking system. It’s a high-brow reference to the fact that today’s government proposals will be a mix of white and green paper. Many of the more radical decisions will be delayed for more consultation. Some angry taxpayers could…
If there are green shoots appearing in the economy, then the slugs have started to munch them. A shock fall of 2.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2009 is the worst quarter-on-quarter fall since 1958. The annual fall in the economy of -4.9 per cent of GDP is the largest since records began…
So the cross-party crossfire on spending and deficits continues. It is remarkable that the actual underlying figures in this spat are totally unchanged from the figures we first reported on the day of the Budget itself. But there clearly is a problem to be solved, and the political process seems to be shedding more heat…
Post-meltdown Mansion House was always going to be a little different from the traditional orgy of self-congratulation, backslapping, and an ever lighter regulatory touch. But in the end the bruising speech came from the governor of the Bank of England rather than the chancellor of the exchequer.
It’s the Mansion House speech tonight, and it comes on a day when unemployment numbers on the claimant count went up by much less than expected. The chancellor himself is the most high profile example of this. Just a fortnight ago, his own team were unsure as to whether he would be delivering tonight’s landmark…
Update: Opposition reaction: Delighted, but still worried about the optimistic bounce of 3.5 per cent growth forecast for 2011
Remarkably, the highly respected National Institute for Economic and Social Research have just released a report saying the recession may have ended. Martin Weale has just told me that ‘So far as we can say, the recession is over, but there might be another downward dip’.
Today the chancellor is going into the lion’s den to defend the bankers. Europe feels that Britain failed to regulate the City ‘casino’ properly, and helped stoke the financial disaster that caused the recession across Europe. The European Commission has come up with proposals that would give two continent-wide institutions the ultimate ability to regulate…
Amid the chaos, it appears Team Brown are clinging on to one hope: the economy. As the prime minister himself has just said: “People are beginning to see the difference… there are already some instances of the economy showing results.” There’s some irony here. In a previous abortive attempt at blogging I posted about electionomics…
The housing boom returned in May and it’s difficult to know whether we should grin, cry or just laugh.