Faisal Islam
QE is halted. All hail QT – The Mervyn and George Show
Channel 4 News’s economic correspondent Faisal Islam imagines how quantitative tightening might take place.
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Faisal Islam
IFS budget: don’t cut now, but cut larger, later
The message in the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Green Budget, published today, is: don’t cut now but plan credible larger cuts for the entirety of the next parliament, blogs Faisal Islam.
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Faisal Islam
Amid the looming dark clouds a jobless ‘miracle’
The Bank of England and the Treasury celebrate as figures show a shock improvement in the labour market.
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Faisal Islam
Covert bank loans revealed
Channel 4 News Economics correspondent Faisal Islam examines the news that the Bank of England loand more than £60bn to RBS and HBoS in secret.
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Faisal Islam
Continuing the game of pin the tail on the economic donkey
It’s a cosmic game of pin the tail on the donkey. The tail is the amount of money creation that the Bank of England deliberates over. The donkey is the British economy. The Bank has just voted to increase its money creation exercise to £200 billion. A £25 billion increase is a little less than…
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Faisal Islam
Government bailout 3.0: Lloyds and RBS
Following on from Bailout 1.0 (the banking system) and Bailout 2.0 (the economy), Bailout 3.0 focuses on the RBS and Lloyds, two banks in which the government has acquired a significant stake.
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Jon Snow
Hold your breath and hope the governor is wrong
Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow says he is not surprised to read the Bank of England governor Mervyn King and Gordon Brown have different views about breaking up the mega-banks.
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Faisal Islam
Mervyn’s money mania means Cameron need not worry – yet
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.
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Faisal Islam
Merv the Oracle and the phantom jobless
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…
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Faisal Islam
UK banking needs more than hard self-regulation
‘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…
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Faisal Islam
King is speaking to Osborne as well as Darling
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.
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Jon Snow
After the politics, the policies
So to policy now that the personality of the prime minister has, for the time being, been parked. So what to expect? Mostly obviously, I guess, we look to proposed changes in Post Office ownership, now to be kicked into the long grass. A possible end, too, for the ID scheme (estimated cost: £5bn), and…
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Faisal Islam
Electionomics II: promoting short-term growth
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…
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Faisal Islam
House prices on the up – is boomtime back?
The housing boom returned in May and it’s difficult to know whether we should grin, cry or just laugh.
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Faisal Islam
Too soon for green shoots, says MPC member Sentance
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).