Monthly Archives: December 2007

The choices for handling Northern Rock have been narrowed to three by the spinners for the government and the Lib Dems. The first is sale of the bank to a third party who could repay some of the government loans immediately, and take care of Northern’s financing needs thereafter. The best chance of doing this [...]

Today, at last, on the Jeremy Vine show, I was allowed to explain how the government should deal with Northern Rock, and set about getting our money back from the ailing mortgage bank. I was also allowed to debate why nationalisation would be too expensive and too risky for taxpayers with Vince Cable. I trust [...]

The government’s bodged sale/reorganisation of Northern Rock has a new complication today. We learn that one mortgage bank is interested in buying the mortgages. Maybe others would be too. The response depends on the price they are prepared to offer, and on whether there will be a successful new owner/lead shareholder or not. My advice [...]

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The latest decision to guarantee most of the liabilities of Northern Rock is a clanger. There is no statement to Parliament, no statement of how much is now at risk, and no statement on how long our money is to be at risk. Why cannot the government understand that it has to [...]

Today’s news that the Bank of England is making liquidity available to the markets is a sensible move, but we should not expect too much of it. The mismanagement of the Northern Rock liquidity crisis has made UK based banks very worried about borrowing from the Bank of England, at the very time when they [...]