Recession

The economy would tank. Trade would collapse. Unemployment would soar, and house prices would sink. In the run-up to the referendum, and in the three years of tortured negotiations about leaving since then, we heard lots of dire warnings about what would happen to the economy if we left the EU. And yet we heard very little from the same experts – the Bank of England, the CBI and so on – about what would happen if we didn’t leave at the end of March. And yet it turns out that the British economy has contracted sharply, not because we left the EU, but because we didn’t leave. We are

Recent figures around the UK’s credit and debit card debt are startling indeed, with the number of transactions rising to its highest annual rate since 2008. This, paired with the fact that household income has barely changed over the last decade, has left financiers scared that the UK is on the verge of another recession. Some politicians will blame the government for the current situation. They will say that years of ‘austerity’ forced the British public to buy things with money they didn’t have. Though it is true to an extent that cuts have pushed many towards credit, it is not the whole picture. Relaxed attitudes towards lending have to

It started as displacement activity, my immersion in the market mayhem of the summer of 2007. I was at home looking after my wife Sian Busby and our youngest child. Sian had just been diagnosed with a horrible cancer, and was recovering from radical surgery. She did not want a fuss. And did not want our friends to know the seriousness of what had happened. So in the absence of being able to talk about it, I needed a distraction. So in the study across the hall from where Sian was convalescing, I tried to work out what the hell was happening in global debt markets. What I needed to

For anyone considering a career in economic forecasting, the Bank of England’s inflation report for August 2007 ought to be required reading. A graph illustrating its Monetary Policy Committee’s ‘best collective judgment’ of annual economic growth two years ahead is fixed around a central prediction of 2.5 per cent, with extreme boundaries of 0.8 per cent and 4.2 per cent. But after two years, economic growth was running at –5.6 per cent, and the economy had just completed its fifth consecutive quarter of negative growth. The finest minds of Threadneedle Street could not see two years ahead. In this case, the Bank of England could not even see a few

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/donaldtrumpsangryamerica/media.mp3″ title=”Freddy Gray talks to Isabel Hardman about Donald Trump’s angry America”] Listen [/audioplayer]It was, in the end, the best possible night for Donald Trump. On Super Tuesday, 11 American states voted for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. Trump won seven. That was enough to ensure he remains easily the frontrunner, but not enough to persuade his opponents to coalesce around one of his rivals. Had he won nine or ten, the Republican party might have fallen in behind the man in second place, Ted Cruz. As it turned out, Marco Rubio, the last establishment man standing, won one state, which has encouraged him to keep fighting. But Rubio’s

All this talk of a new financial apocalypse, so soon after the last one, is starting to annoy me. Partly because investors as a crowd are so irrational; -partly because so much that governments and central banks have done to contribute to the current market mayhem seems to work against the sensible efforts of ordinary folk to build a bottom-up recovery. Markets first. We’ve had hissy fits about China, even though connections between the Chinese and UK economies are so marginal. We’ve had near-hysteria about the prospect of (and in the US, the start of) rising interest rates. Now there’s a panic about European banks, because Deutsche Bank, midway through

The campaign to keep Greece in the euro has resulted in five years of groundhog days. The unfortunate country seems to be forever approaching a day of repayments it cannot afford. Ministers and diplomats assemble to thrash out a deal. Meetings collapse in bad temper, and markets sink. Then, at the eleventh hour, a deal is somehow forged. Greece agrees to reforms which seek to cut spending and balance the books in return for billions of pounds of bailout cash. Markets rebound. The money is paid, the debt repayments met. And then all starts to go wrong again. A few months later we are back where we began. Anyone who

It used to be that the most annoying thing in academic life was political correctness. But a new irritant now threatens to supplant it: the scourge of correct politicalness. The essence of correct politicalness is to seek to undermine an irrefutable argument by claiming loudly and repetitively to have found an error in it. As with political correctness, which seeks to undermine arguments by declaring the person making them a bigot, correct politicalness originated in the US. But it now has its exponents here, too. Foremost among them is Jonathan Portes. Portes’s career recalls that of the character Kenneth Widmerpool in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Widmerpool

After months of escalating tensions over Ukraine and talk of a new cold war, Russia and the West could soon reach a surprising rapprochement. The eurozone economy is suffering badly and sanctions against Russia are partly to blame. Winter is also upon us, and that reminds every-one Vladimir Putin still holds the cards when it comes to supplying gas. The clincher, though, is that Ukraine is heading towards financial meltdown. Unless an extremely large bailout is delivered soon, there will be a default, sending shockwaves through the global economy. That’s a risk nobody wants to take — least of all Washington, London or Berlin. Sanctions against Russia were always going to