The buy-to-let property market is back, thanks to the bailed out banks – but it comes at a price and there will be winners and losers, writes Economics Editor Faisal Islam.
At the top of Lloyds Towers the superlatives were being spread about liberally. Chairman Win Bischoff said that he was “immensely proud for having achieved profit”. Chief executive Eric Daniels was “delighted” that the government now has “optionality” on when to sell its 42 per cent stake, now that the share price was up above its 63p purchase price.
The election in many ways is a lie. What Greece ‘s £94bn bailout is showing, and the reported views of the Bank of England governor too, is that Britain over the next two to three years will not resemble the picture of the country that was sold to you in this campaign.
Much of the market finally lost patience today with the umming ahhing, feet-dragging, and generalised incompetence of Europe’s multi-headed economic governance. We face an epic moment in world economics, every bit as critical as the decision to bailout Bear Stearns, and then not to bailout Lehman Brothers. “Sheer panic” was the reaction of one…
Shadow business secretary, Ken Clarke, asserts that a hung parliament will result in the IMF bailing out the British economy.
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…
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…