Monthly Archives: June 2009

Labour is not good at coups. A couple of Cabinet Ministers resigning after reading brieifing against themselves in the press was not enough to bring the government down. They could wound but not kill. If the Chancellor had said he was going, and if some other Ministers had lined up to threaten the same, things [...]

The Monetary Policy Committee will probably keep interest rates at 0.5% and chug on with their programme of quantitative easing. This policy will keep house prices higher than they need to be, will keep many savers starved of a proper return, will extend the government bond bubble,encourage too much debt and do nothing to sort [...]

There is an air of death hanging over this Parliament. Yesterday I was able to ask a question in topical questions without winning the ballot to be be able to do so, because there was no one else wanting to ask anything. The Immigration debate was very thinly attended, despite the importance of the subject [...]

Gordon Brown today gets his come uppance for the crude and unpleasant way Prime Ministers treat colleagues. He inherited from his two past predecessors the bad habit of allowing stories in the press in advance of a reshuffle setting out who is no longer in favour and who has to go. No wonder some Ministers [...]

Witch hunting was always an overrated and unpleasant pastime. It is popular today. We will receive another instalment in the battle of the regulators, as the Lords concludes that the FSA were most at fault in the run up to the Credit Crunch. There will be further pressure to shift powers to the Bank of [...]

I have been puzzling over the May 2009 Bank of England “Inflation Report”. It contains three charts. Chart 2 shows the forecast inflation rate if interest rates reflect market expectations, and Chart 3 shows what happens if interest rates stay at today’s current low level. The text tells us, as we would expect, inflation will [...]

The Us Treasury Secretary has difficult meetings this week with China. Getting the US/China relationship right is crucial to world economic progress. Somehow both sides need to move. The US needs to export more and import less, to save more and borrow less. China needs to import more and export less, to save less and [...]