View from London

Damage to growth has been done

One year on, how does it feel? How does it feel to know that you can't sell your house? That you can't get a loan from the bank to buy a house or, for that matter, anything else? That unemployment is on its way up?
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Inside View from London

The UK’s ongoing economic problems

Tuesday, 2 June 2009

Saturday 17 October, 1964. Jim Callaghan sat at his desk in 11 Downing Street. As the new Chancellor of the Exchequer following Labour's election victory, it was Callaghan's job to sort out Britain's economic problems.
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The Chancellor’s golden goose is no more and the cash has run out

Tuesday, 28 April 2009

It turns out, then, that the Government signed a pact with the financial devil. It was only as a result of the housing boom, the lending glut and big City bonuses that the Government was able to raise the revenues to fund its ambitions for education and health.
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Economic forecasters could learn from meteorologists

Tuesday, 21 April 2009

Economists would make hopeless weather forecasters. Weather forecasters, at least those who worry about the British weather, are not keen on extrapolation.
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East European economic zombies stalking the IMF

Tuesday, 7 April 2009

When the leaders of the G20 sat down to their Jamie Oliver dinner at Downing Street last week there was a ghost at the feast.
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Domestic demands may spoil a global economic solution

Tuesday, 31 March 2009

How much will the financial crisis eventually cost? I'm not talking about the billions of pounds or the trillions of dollars being spent to rebuild the world's financial system.
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The answers to the current crisis could lie in Japan

Monday, 23 March 2009

What, today, counts as economic policy success? At their recent meeting the G20 finance ministers promised to “take whatever action is necessary until growth is restored.”
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Will printing more money ease crisis?

Monday, 16 March 2009

There is something wonderfully quirky about the way in which a major change in monetary arrangements is announced in the UK.
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Did Marx have it right all along?

Monday, 9 March 2009

“Modern bourgeois society... a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
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Eurozone is being stress-tested, but it will not break apart easily

Monday, 2 March 2009

The European leaders gathered recently in Berlin, their aim apparently being to move towards a common approach at the forthcoming Group of Twenty economic summit in London in April, as to what to do about the global downturn.
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Rate cuts will not end this crisis

Monday, 23 February 2009

“Chugger chugger chugger chugger”... yes, it's the sound of the printing press. With UK interest rates down to 1% and US interest rates at zero, it's no longer possible to pretend that rate cuts alone will bring this economic crisis to an end. In the monetary sphere, something else needs to be done.
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Monetary and fiscal policy can do little without a return of trust

Monday, 16 February 2009

How bad is the current crisis? Bad enough for Barack Obama's new US administration to reach a deal with Congress on an $827bn (£560bn) stimulus package, worth almost 6% of GDP if delivered in a single year.
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Roquefort cheese spat may be first whiff of a return to fiscal nationalism

Monday, 9 February 2009

As a symbol of the growing protectionist backlash, it’s hard to beat the recent protests in the UK.
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Why the Bank of England needs to look back and think the unthinkable

Tuesday, 3 February 2009

On October 24, 1930, a report from the British government's Economic Advisory Council was circulated by Ramsay MacDonald, the Prime Minister, to his Cabinet.
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Bank of England was powerless in the face of excessive credit growth

Monday, 26 January 2009

Rationing is associated with the Second World War, austerity Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s and, for those familiar with Moscow pre-Glasnost, the empty shelves of GUM, the Soviet Union's leading, but mostly empty, department store in the 1970s and 1980s.
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Confidence in the economy is held up by gossamer threads

Monday, 19 January 2009

“In the bleak midwinter ... ” Britain's weather may be distinctly chilly at the moment, but its economic climate is a lot frostier. And unlike the weather, there's no escape. Economically, it's hard to find sunnier climes elsewhere in the world.
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