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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…