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.
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.
Faisal Islam blogs on how Brompton bikes have become the new Lara Croft.
Jon Snow
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.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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…
