Faisal Islam has left Channel 4 News. This is an archive of his blogs.
It’s a supreme irony that on this day of Whitehall whirlwind, there’s actually been the first hard evidence that the economy might be on the turn. After the worst recession for at least four decades, one closely followed indicator is suggesting the economy actually grew, in May, for the first time in 14 months
The future for LDV is looking very bleak indeed. Hundreds of jobs are at risk, perhaps thousands at suppliers. Ministers refer to the bid from the mysterious Malaysian company Weststar as “the only game in town” and that’s why they advanced a controversial £5m “bridging loan”.
The UK financial system was bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of £500bn in 2008. Economics Editor Faisal Islam analyses the government’s response as it pumped billions of pounds into the city.
I’ve just been in Liverpool with Monetary Policy Committee member Andrew Sentance. He told me it wasn’t helpful to talk about green shoots at the moment – instead, we should be looking for an indication that things are bottoming out (see the clip below).
See also: my earlier post on our exclusive interview with Debt Management Office chief Robert Stheeman. Here’s a remarkable fact. The Debt Management Office needs to raise £220bn this year. To do that, the DMO will sell £220bn worth of gilts into the market. Meanwhile at the Bank of England they are in the middle…
For ordinary Britons, and companies, the credit bubble is as much a matter of history as the Tulip bubble. For governments, however, the credit boom is only just beginning. And Robert Stheeman is about to start running the biggest overdraft in British history. Mr Stheeman is the chief executive of the Debt Management Office, the…
At the highest levels of the Treasury and the Bank of England, they are talking about the “Honda Effect”. As luck would have it, yesterday I went to visit the Honda factory in Swindon. The fact that it was in the final fortnight of a four-month production shutdown was as tangible an example of the…
Schadenfreude. As the cast of Avenue Q sing so admirably, “it’s German for happiness at the misfortune of others”. There may be a touch of it around the Treasury today. For months, they were told by the likes of the IMF that the UK would suffer the most stinkingly heinous recession of all the world’s…
As I said earlier, my best assessment of the Bank’s assessment is that they fear a W-shaped double-dipping relapse in the economy in a few months’ time. I also pondered on Twitter whether the recession would in fact be “skip-shaped” ie ___/ Other suggestions were “buttock-shaped” (from @callummay)
It was the inflation forecast that wasn’t. The Bank of England still seemed more concerned with deflationary tendencies in the economy. And Mervyn King appeared ultra-cautious about any sort of forecast. At one point the governor of the Bank of England even implored the assembled economics hacks to help him explain to the country just…
Economic diplomacy is back in a big way. That was the message from last month’s G20 summit, and it continues today with high-level UK-China chinwag. The system that failed the world plunging trade and global growth to contractions not seen since World War Two was a system that was international. Gaps in regulation existed between…
If MPs were forced to repay some of the more ridiculous expense claims, a few might join the ranks of Britain’s growing personal insolvencies. MPs that go bankrupt are forced to forfeit their seat. Is this what is meant by politically bankrupt?
If you step away from the details of bathplugs, unnecessary taxis and sibling cleaning contracts, there is a staggering picture emerging about the MPs who decide our laws. During the biggest housing boom in Britain’s history (and some economists argue in world history) many of the politicians who had the power to rein it in…
The biggest surprise today was not the extra £50bn of Mervyn’s magic money to be created for the purposes of fertilising the embryonic green shoots spotted by stock market traders. Forget Barclays’ remarkably strong results, and Lloyds’ further revelation of the devastation wrought upon its balance sheet by the purchase of HBoS.
Playing the ‘blame game’ is mostly viewed as a contemptuous pursuit. But a credible version of Credit Crunch Cluedo will be vital to our long-term prospects. After the dotcom boom, instead of watching the banking system’s ever more elaborate risk-multiplication ruses, the DTI and Treasury pumped out reports about how to copy the enterprising success…