To hear Western leaders talk, you would think their countries were out of recession. GDP numbers are climbing, aren’t they? So why are governments getting deeper into debt, unemployment is rising and real wages declining? Think back to the 1930s: we ain’t seen nothing yet. The UK jobless rate is predicted to rise to 9% […]
Archive | UK Economy
Forecasting the Future – Again
You would think he knows what he’s talking about. Charlie Bean, after all, is Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. In fact, he doesn’t. So why has he informed the Royal Statistical Society that it was not possible to forecast recession? Answer: because he wants to exonerate the Bank and persuade us that the […]
The Debt: a Political Fraud
Countries like Ireland and Spain are slashing public spending, to reduce sovereign debt. Britain’s coalition government, however, is providing the most transparent disclosure of the social consequences of the property boom/bust. The UK’s social system is being re-sculpted. Strip away the reassuring language, and we find that this nation is being sent back to the […]
Throwing Good Money after Bad
The Bank of England is spending £3.5m to rebuild its forecasting model. Having failed to alert Britain of the looming disasters, it now wants to factor in some equations about the financial markets. But it is not incorporating an equation on the land market. So don’t expect it to perform any better in the future. […]
When’s the Next Property Crash?
Finally, relevant analysis of what caused the Depression of 2010. And since the cause was exclusively related to the economics of the land market, which brought the last business cycle to an end, this inevitably leads to the question: Will the next cycle also be driven by a land-led boom/bust? The onset of the new […]
Osborne’s Fraudulent Deal
IT’S the macho stroke that governments like to pull to persuade voters that they are acting “tough” in the public’s interest. Gordon Brown’s gesture was the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) back in 1997. George Osborne’s stunt is the Financial Policy Committee, which he calls “a new settlement between our banks and the rest of our […]
The Next “Crisis of Capitalism”
Déjà vu! Gordon Brown shifted responsibility for delivering a stable economy onto nine hapless economists within days of being appointed Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1997. We know how unsuccessful they were in fulfilling their mandate as the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. Among the first of those unwise men was […]
Into the Depression
WHEN I wrote Boom Bust in 2005, I used the word “depression” with care. What was going to happen would not be a recession. What we see unfolding, now, is the beginning of the mid-way phase of the depression. Prepare for the violence, in all its forms, in the Age of Austerity. Instead of adopting […]