City A.M.’s at-a-glance guide to the key points of Osborne’s mini-Budget November 29, 2011 UK ECONOMIC OUTLOOK • The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has slashed the growth forecasts it made in March. • Its central forecast for 2011 has been revised down to 0.9 per cent from the 1.7 per cent March prediction. It expects 0.7 per cent year-on-year GDP growth in 2012, instead of 2.5 per cent. [...]
City A.M.’s at-a-glance guide to the key points of Osborne’s mini-Budget November 29, 2011 UK ECONOMIC OUTLOOK • The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has slashed the growth forecasts it made in March. • Its central forecast for 2011 has been revised down to 0.9 per cent from the 1.7 per cent March prediction. It expects 0.7 per cent year-on-year GDP growth in 2012, instead of 2.5 per cent. [...]
Dexia says governments may step in after its shares plunge October 3, 2011 THE BOARD of struggling Franco-Belgian bank Dexia last night said it will work with governments to “resolve the structural problems penalising the group’s operational activities”. The board held an emergency meeting last night to discuss options for the bank after Moody’s said it was on review for a credit rating downgrade, claiming that its funding [...]
Gloomy outlook for UK firms October 10, 2011 FEARS of economic stagnation in the UK were heightened today, after a leading survey of businesses reported an increasingly gloomy outlook. The third quarter results “point to a deterioration in the economic situation, with concerning signs of stagnation in the domestic economy”, the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) said. And the planned “rebalancing” of the [...]
Eurozone back in the eye of the storm December 14, 2011 YOU can’t fool all the people all of the time. Unfortunately, you can generally con quite a few of them temporarily, but it doesn’t usually last very long. The most recent EU summit was a case in point. With all such meetings, investors temporarily accept politicians’ claims to have triumphed at face value, as long as [...]
France and Belgium to break up Dexia October 4, 2011 The governments of France and Belgium have ridden to the rescue of banking giant Dexia in the first bank bail-out caused by the eurozone debt crisis. Dexia, a lender to thousands of French local authorities, will see its French municipal finance arm broken off and put under the ownership of French government banks. The rescue [...]
King: Summit can’t fix euro fundamentals October 25, 2011 A LONG-TERM fix for the Eurozone crisis will not be found at the current summit, Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King predicted yesterday. “The aim of the measures to be introduced over the next few days is to create a year or possibly two years’ breathing space,” he told the Treasury select committee. “The [...]
Time to think about euro’s break-up November 6, 2011 IT is finally all over for George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister. Barring yet another u-turn, he will step down and a so-called national unity government will be created with the help of opposition leader Antonis Samaras. It’s not as if the two men are strangers: astonishingly, they were roommates at Amherst College in the [...]
Markets suffer as G20 disappoints November 4, 2011 World stock markets suffered today as the Cannes meetings of the world’s top 20 economies reached no new agreement on how to solve the crisis engulfing Europe. Investors sought out safe-haven assets such as UK and US government debt and sold equities and the euro after German Chancellor Angela Merkel said few countries in the [...]
Osborne in hunt for growth plan November 13, 2011 CHANCELLOR George Osborne is in talks with institutional investors about getting private cash to fund billions in infrastructure projects as part of a desperate bid to get the economy moving despite the global debt crisis. Among the ideas being mulled by HM Treasury is the establishment of an infrastructure investment fund to channel private money [...]