‘Bond market tantrum risks’: Gilt traders brace for Labour leftward pivot as Starmer future uncertain
UK and Europe on a collision course March 12, 2012 IT is the elephant in the room, the issue nobody wants to talk about. But the growing, irreconcilable gulf between what UK voters and their continental counterparts want from European integration will eventually become as important a question as the fallout from the economic crisis. The scale of the challenge is laid bare by YouGov-Cambridge [...]
Economy is being knocked off course March 11, 2012 IT is not looking too good for George Osborne. The Budget is next week and the economy remains mired in stagnation. It is hard to know for sure what is happening, but all the indications are that growth so far this quarter has been weak. Industrial production actually fell in January, despite a rise in [...]
Greek deal won’t save the Eurozone March 8, 2012 IT was long a foregone conclusion that enough bondholders would sign up to the Greek plans. But it would be a terrible mistake to believe that as a result all of the Eurozone’s problems have gone away. They haven’t. Two issues have been kicked into the long grass; all the others remain. Greece will be [...]
Mortgage time-bomb UK’s top threat March 7, 2012 SOME time-bombs can be defused. Not this one. At some point – in a year, in two, or perhaps even in five – the cost of borrowing for consumers will climb back to the sorts of levels we were used to 15 years ago. Complacent borrowers addicted to rock-bottom interest rates – and for whom [...]
Industrial policies are doomed to fail March 6, 2012 SLOWLY but surely, the British establishment is forgetting the lessons of the past 35 years. We have seen the return of high taxes, a softer approach to inflation, talk of wealth taxes (eerily similar to those supported by the Labour party in 1979), the rationalisation of envy and now even a comeback for economic nationalism. [...]
War on Britain’s aspirational classes March 5, 2012 THERE is something very wrong with Britain’s tax system. Imagine you are an aspiring, successful hard-working individual; after several years putting in the hours, you now earn £42,475 a year. You’re already a victim of the tax system: you pay no tax on your first £8,105, but then face 20 per cent tax on the [...]
Taxing homes more isn’t the answer March 4, 2012 HERE is my factoid of the day: Italians have just replaced Russians as the top foreign buyers of prime central London properties, ending years of oligarch dominance, according to Knight Frank. The only reason the Greeks aren’t ranked higher is that there are too few of them. Analysts interested in predicting financial crises and unrest [...]
All tax rates are too high in Britain March 1, 2012 IT was good to see yet more entrepreneurs and small business owners joining in the campaign to scrap the 50p tax rate yesterday. But supporters of the tax were also out in force yesterday; they deployed three main arguments. The first is that “bankers” (in modern parlance, anybody who works in finance, including fund managers, [...]
Entrepreneurs finally fighting back February 29, 2012 BUSINESS people have a tendency to run scared of political debate. They rarely want to criticise politicians on the record (though they are often extremely outspoken in private). They very rarely agree to give interviews to discuss controversial subjects. This is a great tragedy: capitalists are failing to speak up for capitalism, allowing those who [...]
China’s bad debts will fuel next crisis February 29, 2012 THERE can be no doubt that China’s story is one of astonishing economic success. Ever since they started to embrace capitalism in the late 1970s, the authorities in Beijing have presided over the greatest, most extensive wealth creation and poverty reduction experiment in history. But the remaining elements of central planning at the heart of [...]