Remortgage fall prompts calls to extend funding for lending May 9, 2013 REMORTGAGE lender LMS called for an extension to the funding for lending scheme (FLS) yesterday after February showed a deep drop in remortgage lending. Households drew £2.6bn of equity out of their houses in February, LMS figures showed, down 11.3 per cent compared to January, falling faster than overall mortgage lending. The number of loans fell even [...]
How positive start-up innovation is making full-time work redundant May 3, 2013 ASK a business owner 20 years ago how big their company was and, like the pharaohs, he or she would soon tell you how many people they employed. Full-time staff numbers denoted personal achievement and the business’s (and owner’s) social value. Today, precisely the opposite is true. In volatile markets and desperate to avoid fixed [...]
Beat the market with wisdom of the crowd May 3, 2013 Annabel Palmer talks with founder of online trading community eToro about how social media is changing the way people trade, and what to expect from City A.M.’s 2013 Active Trader Conference Q How is social media changing the way people trade? A Recent research we carried out with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown [...]
£200k bar bill trader Alex Hope charged over FX scheme May 2, 2013 ALEX Hope, the 24-year-old trader who gained notoriety after running up a £200,000 bar bill at a Liverpool nightclub, was yesterday charged in relation to an unauthorised £5m investment scheme. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has accused Hope and his business associate Raj Von Badlo of a total of ten offences relating to a scheme that purported [...]
British public is slowly becoming more fiscally conservative May 2, 2013 MEMO to the political class: your electorate doesn’t believe you are spending their money wisely. The data is striking: 78 per cent of the public agree that “politicians are too reckless about how they spend taxpayers’ money”; just 12 per cent disagree, according to a poll by ComRes for the 4th Agenda. The vast majority [...]
Italian PM calls for new steps to hike growth May 2, 2013 ITALY’S new Prime Minister yesterday vowed to emphasise growth as well as austerity in a new effort to relieve some of the pain facing the struggling country. Enrico Letta is likely to abandon a sales tax rise planned for the summer, scrap Mario Monti’s housing tax and shake up the welfare system. Parliamentarians approved the [...]
Drama behind the scenes at City election May 2, 2013 THERE was more drama than usual at last month’s City of London elections. Academic and clergyman Muhammad Al-Hussaini, standing for the Castle Baynard ward, was representing the William Wallace Campaign with the popular pledge of “free beer for everyone forever.” However, an ill-judged email sent in jest created more of a stir than his policy. [...]
Proof, at last: The more money we earn, the happier we are May 2, 2013 ECONOMICS is at its best when it tears into the received wisdom. Take the almost universal view that money doesn’t buy happiness, and that millionaires are just as likely to be miserable as the rest of us. Guess what – it’s nonsense. On average, money is actually very good at buying happiness, as the experts [...]
Reality is intruding on the extreme claims of climate change alarmists May 1, 2013 A COMMON feature of debates about global warming is that extreme claims often go unchallenged. At best, criticism is impolitic. Worse, critics are portrayed as tools of malign fossil fuel interests. Being impervious to push-back leads to what I describe in my recent book as climate change derangement syndrome, when normally sane people say dumb [...]
Cheap funds for lenders in bid to boost borrowing April 30, 2013 BANKS are being offered cheap funding for another year in a renewed drive to boost lending to the private sector and get the economy moving. The funding for lending scheme (FLS) was launched in August and was expected to run for 18 months. But the Bank of England and the government are worried that lending [...]