Obsessing over the UK’s GDP numbers is a waste of time October 5, 2011 IT is astonishing that anybody in the markets, think-tanks or politics still takes the Office for National Statistics’ growth figures seriously. Yesterday’s sweeping rewriting of history by our official number-crunchers shows yet again the stupidity of those who obsess about whether growth is coming in at 0.1 or 0.2 per cent. The ONS has suddenly [...]
WHAT THE OTHER PAPERS SAY THIS MORNING October 5, 2011 THE TIMES BRISTOL DEAL GOES WITH THE FLOW Bristol Water yesterday became the latest British utility company to change hands. The West Country water company, which supplies 1.1m homes in and around Bristol, has had 70 per cent of its shares sold to Capstone Infrastructure, an asset investment fund that used to operate as the [...]
New stress test to cover banks’ bond holdings October 5, 2011 EUROPE’S banking regulator began to look again at its tests of the strength of the region’s banks yesterday in two-day crisis talks over the collapse of Franco-Belgian lender Dexia. Eurozone finance ministers asked the European Banking Authority to reassess how well the banks would survive a write-down in the value of their holdings of Eurozone [...]
More cash left at the ECB amid downgrades October 5, 2011 AS GREEK protestors and strikers returned to the streets of Athens in fresh clashes with police yesterday Eurozone lenders fled to safety, using the European Central Bank as a safe house for increasing amounts of cash on Tuesday night, figures yesterday showed. Overnight deposits at the ECB rose to €213bn from €209bn on Monday, the [...]
IMF baffled by calls to enter bond market as fears of a slump grow October 5, 2011 THE INTERNATIONAL Monetary Fund has urged Europe to shore up its banks with up an injection of up to €200bn (£172.6bn) amid fears a freeze in lending will trigger another recession. Yesterday Antonio Borges (pictured), the IMF’s Europe director, said the move would help to restore confidence across the continent. “We are talking about figures [...]
Plan for Dexia rescue fund is taking shape October 5, 2011 CUSTOMERS pulled millions of euros from troubled Dexia yesterday but the Franco-Belgian bank avoided a full-scale run on deposits as a bailout appeared imminent. Belgian customers withdrew around €300m (£258.88bn) from Dexia accounts, excluding online transactions. The Belgian arm of the bank holds €80bn in deposits. An emergency package is set to be announced today [...]
PM hit by row over debts on credit cards October 5, 2011 DAVID CAMERON was forced to hastily redraft parts of his conference speech yesterday, after he was widely criticised for pre-released extracts that called on Britons to repay their credit card debts. “The only way out of this crisis is to deal with your debts. That means households – all of us – paying off the [...]
VIEWS ON CONSUMER CREDIT: THE UK’S NOT SO JOINED-UP GOVERNMENT October 5, 2011 David Cameron praised households for reducing debts, saying that was how to fight a debt crisis. Earlier drafts of the speech urged consumers to pay credit cards off to give the economy a lower-debt foundation for growth. “I have set the Treasury to work on ways to inject money directly into small businesses,” said George [...]
CITY VIEWS: SHOULD PEOPLE BE ENCOURAGED TO REDUCE PERSONAL DEBT? October 5, 2011 PETER GOAD | LLOYDS “I am not sure that it would help anyway to be honest, as banks make a lot of their money through people not paying credit card debts. It is very impractical.” DAVE PHILLIPS | JRP UNDERWRITING “It is not up to the government if we don’t pay our own personal debt. [...]
ONS: We got GDP figures wrong by tens of billions October 5, 2011 THE BOOM was bigger and the bust was sharper than previously thought, according to major revisions to the last decade’s GDP figures, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said yesterday. Previously, figures showed cumulative economic growth of 17.9 per cent from 2001 to the end of 2007. That has been revised up to 21.1 per [...]