Faisal Islam
IMF: Banks should pay their own way and no ‘Robin Hood’ tax
Faisal Islam blogs on the IMF report into making banks pay their own way
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Will hung parliament lead to IMF bailout?
Shadow business secretary, Ken Clarke, asserts that a hung parliament will result in the IMF bailing out the British economy.
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Gary Gibbon
Eurozone deal over Greek debt crisis
We now have a draft statement from the French and the Germans which is about to be put to the other Eurozone countries.
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Gary Gibbon
Denis Healey and the man behind Britain’s IMF bail-out
Interviewing Denis Healey and former IMF chief Johannes Witteveen about the day Britain had to be bailed out by the IMF.
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Faisal Islam
Has the IMF pulled the rug out from under David Cameron?
In the not-very-funny economics joke, the IMF stands for “it’s mostly fiscal”. That’s a reference to its long-held ideology of forcing developing countries to cut spending and budget deficits in response to almost any financial crisis. It was a sort of cosmic chastity belt on fiscal profligacy. So what better ally for the prospective iron…
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Faisal Islam
The economic hitmen have struck the UK
There are many men in dark glasses in Washington DC during the summer. Amongst the most feared have been the International Monetary Fund economists who fly around the world reviewing the policies of individual countries – so-called Article IV Consultations. Such a team has been in the UK over the past weeks and a few…
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Faisal Islam
German GDP: at last, a stat that makes UK look good
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…
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Faisal Islam
Can China spare Britain a few billion?
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…
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Faisal Islam
What to watch out for in ‘hangover budget’
“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…
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Faisal Islam
IMF: UK faces £200bn bank bailout cost… or does it?
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…
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Jon Snow
Zoellick: global finance and a flyer's cold
I have just emerged from the World Bank offices in Millbank and an interview with its president, Robert Zoellick. He has a formidable intellect and interesting moustache. He too had a flyer’s cold. I told him of the benefits of squirting saline water up your nasal passages in the morning and at night. He was grateful.…
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Zambia: can IMF plug the looming crisis?
Zambia is reckoned to be the 13th poorest country in the world. Sixty-four per cent of the people live in poverty. More than one in six children die before their fifth birthday, and if you live to the age of 42 you are doing better than average. Britain is the largest bilateral donor to Zambia,…
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Meeting a PM who 'must have a death wish'
RIGA, LATVIA – I am sitting in the Latvian parliament in downtown Riga, waiting for the new Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis to show up for an interview. And the words of a local economist are ringing in my ears. “Anyone who wants to run this country must have a death wish,” he told me on the…