The global stock market roller coaster ride over the last few weeks which has seen the UK stock market fall by 13% from its’ May 2011 peak tells us one thing: the world economy is heading for a recession, in effect a double dip one that has its roots in August 2007’s crisis of credit [...]
Must be able to oversee holding of countries to ransom while slashing public spending and selling off their assets. The resignation of the Strauss Kahn as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) because of his arrest for an alleged sexual assault on a hotel chambermaid raises issues around the murky secretive world of [...]
The meeting of the finance ministers from the 20 major economies has just finished this weekend in Paris. They were focused on two things: growth and re-balancing the world economy. In reality they wanted growth in developed western economies at the expense of the developing economies of China, India and Brasil. Is that the way [...]
1. European Union (EU) Debt Crisis The bailout of Greece and Portugal in 2001 put strains on the whole Euro system. A single currency with competing national capitals and a diverse range of economies is unsustainable. Portugal is unlikely to survive beyond the first half of 2010 without a bailout. Spain is the big one [...]
Brown’s “big” proposal to tax financial transactions – the so called Tobin tax – has been met with opposition by almost all the finance ministers of the G20. The reason is obvious; it actively discourages the trading of financial assets. It is this trading in 2009 of assets on the back of a new financial [...]
The recent meeting of the G20 leaders in Pittsburgh has seen the USA radically restructure the management of global capitalism’s finance and economic systems. The G20 came in to existence in the late 1990’s as a response to the first globalised financial crisis – the Asian crisis. While the world economy has been globalised for [...]
In an incredible admission that a wave of countries from the periphery of the European Union to emerging markets to Eastern Europe to major countries such as the UK, the G20 has quadrupled the size of the International Monetary Fund to an incredible $1 trillion. This fund will be used to bail out bankrupt countries [...]
What a week it has been for the global financial and economic system. Capitalism’s latest crisis which has been running since August 2007 is rapidly tuning into a global whirlwind that is on the brink of becoming its’ second great depression. Europe At the end of last week several Russian banks indicated they would have [...]
The sovereign wealth funds have lost a few hundred billion from the money they put into banks over the last 8 months. Banks are just eating capital up to cover writing off loans and losses on derivatives. Darling is about to set up £200bn fund to prop up the banks again. The falling oil price [...]
The 1.5% cut in base rates has confirmed what we have been saying since January of this year: the UK is entering its most severe economic recession since the 1930s. Even the most optimistic economists are predicting that the UK will be in recession for the whole of 2009 – that is negative growth in [...]
