Image by: Mangpages It’s been so long since we’ve had an economic downturn that people have forgotten recessions are about being fired, losing your home, and companies going under. The mainstream press is instead treating the recession more like a seasonal change in fashion. In a strange echo of the frivolous attitude that stoked up [...]
Commentary
Looks like the age of 0% interest rates has come early for customers of TD Waterhouse in the UK, which just announced the rates pictured for cash held in its various share dealing accounts. Dealing accounts typically offer terrible interest rates on uninvested cash, but 0% is taking the biscuit (or rather all of the [...]
Honestly, I despair. The day before the UK Government unveils a second banking rescue package worth hundreds of billions of pounds and RBS (once one of the world’s largest banks) falls 67% to become a penny stock, the Conservative party apparatus circulates a press release concerning… Value Added Tax in a Government gift shop. On [...]
The ever fantastic economics blog The Big Picture has reprinted an interesting letter from John Mauldin, the best-selling US investment writer, in which he details the odd things going on in the markets. Like most private investors I can’t pretend to understand all of it, but it does reinforce that these times really are as [...]
(Image by: magnus) What has the UK government got against young people? Why is it obsessed with pulling up the drawbridge to anyone who’d like to buy a home but who can’t afford (or won’t pay) credit bubble prices? I will declare my interest: I rent, having decided several years ago that housing was too [...]
Bloomberg is reporting that more than 2,000 companies around the world have cash balances exceeding their market capitalization. That’s more than eight times as many cash rich companies as when the last bear market bottomed in 2002. With these companies, a $1 share is worth more than $1, just in terms of the cash held [...]
As a saver whose income is modestly into the higher tax bracket, yesterday’s pre-budget report wasn’t great. Here are the main measures designed to get Labour re-elected and stimulate the economy: Spend now: Temporary cut in VAT, from 17.5% to 15% (until December 2009) Extra £60 to pensioners in January Early increase in child tax [...]
Written in 1989, Liar’s Poker remains one of the best route maps around Wall Street’s corridors of ‘high’ finance: that is, the skullduggery that brought us the credit crunch and destroyed itself in the process. Now Liar’s Poker author, Michael Lewis, has written on The End of Wall Street’s Boom in Portfolio magazine, and as [...]
Subprime silliness, nailed by two comedians back in 2007. (As opposed to being explained by the comedians who came up with sub-prime and were still defending it back then.) For non-UK readers, the chaps in the video are the always excellent Fortune and Bird, who often speak more the truth in their rambling obfuscations. MBEs [...]
So about two years ago I got talking to a friend’s mother who had inherited Barclays shares, because I am the sort of nerdy person who talks about shares at dinner parties. She had no thoughts on the bank’s future. She simply owned a bit of it. I suggested to my friend that she might [...]
Pretty, isn’t it? Well, perhaps not if you’re a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, responsible for setting interest rates. In your case it’s a headache: a rather bloodier shade of red might be more appropriate. The graph is taken from the Bank of England’s latest quarterly Inflation Report for November 2008. [...]
Tax, schmax. Nobody likes paying taxes: from the richest to the poorest, we all think we’re getting a poor return, even if we believe in theory, as me and Warren Buffet do, that taxes are a necessary evil for the good of society. Given that I’d rather write a dinner invitation to my mistress’s mother-in-law [...]