Faisal Islam has left Channel 4 News. This is an archive of his blogs.
Yet more indications today of Britain’s radically altered political landscape. Some irony that the Labour left’s long-desired aim to cancel a raft of multibillion pound defence contracts will, in all probability, be realised by a Conservative chancellor responding to the costs of a crisis in capitalism. I can’t get across enough how much this crisis…
A measure of the new world we are entering. Between this financial year and next there is a cash increase of £30.2bn in public spending. Of that increase, fully £15.7bn is going on interest payments servicing our newly ballooning debt. The total interest payments of £43bn will be more than non-investment spending in the defence…
In a nutshell: we have a £5bn tax cut right now. A boom, Then a £5bn tax rise. Massive deficits in the coming three years of half a trillion pounds. BUT even those rely on a remarkable boom in 2011. Look at the chart below to get an idea of the likely size of the…
“Building Britain’s Future” is the title of today’s budget, but it will be a document mired in the past. The figures released at lunchtime will make the wrong sort of long-term history, marking public debts and deficits never before seen in peacetime. But really this is a budget about recent history, about the calamitous carnage…
On a day when deflation becomes official on Britain’s most commonly watched price measure, when the IMF suggests the world’s financial system is barely a quarter of the way through dealing with $4.1tr of rotting toxic assets (and that doesn’t even include the infamous stockpile of uranium that Lehman owns), an enterprising economist might ask…
UPDATE: The IMF retracted its claim. ORIGINAL POST: The IMF has hugely upgraded its projection for the likely total costs of the bank bailout. In today’s Global Financial Stability Report the costs of financial stabilisation are put at a whopping 13.4 per cent of GDP, or £200bn. This brings the IMF in to line with…
The budget is less than 48 hours away, yet there may be as much left out of this document as put in. Certainly the single biggest budget decision made since November’s mini-budget may or may not score in the number crunching: a likely loss of tens of billions from the government insurance scheme for the…
The world is in an era of epic economics. So huge are the challenges, they will define domestic politics for years. Forget about the right answers, politicians are only just beginning to come up with the right questions. And in this strange new world there often is no right answer. The international aspects of the…
SINGAPORE – When Gordon Brown said that he wouldn’t be dictated to by “a few speculators who want to make money out of Britain,” he was talking about Jim Rogers. Peter Mandelson called Mr Rogers “foolish“. Those were understandable responses to Mr Rogers’ assertions that post-oil-and-credit-boom Britain “had nothing left to sell” and that “sterling…
SHANGHAI, CHINA – How is it that the country with one of the poorest populations in the world is the biggest lender to the richest? How can it be that apparently one of the prime agenda items for Mrs Clinton’s Chinese visit was her indebtedness to her country’s indebtedness. Well, welcome to Chimerica. It’s the…
Faisal Islam travelled to Singapore, one of the world’s largest ports, and manufacturers in Liverpool to see how the trade system is shuddering to a halt.
Within a week in October 2008 the US and UK governments were forced to bailout their banks in order to save the economic system as the credit crunch began to bite.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 triggered financial turmoil around the world. Economics Editor Faisal Islam reveals the inside story of how close Britain came to a costly bailout.
Faisal Islam sounds a warning note for British savers attracted to Icelandic institutions by high interest rates. Six months later, the country’s economy – and its major banks – collapsed.
Across the country a run on Britain’s fifth largest lender after the Bank of England offers Northern Rock unlimited support.