Archive for the ‘UK economy’ Category
Posted by seumasach on November 17, 2010
The eurosceptics are sniping away as usual being too foolish to see that it’s UK banking that is on the line:
Sources close to Chancellor George Osborne made clear that the Government views the Irish crisis as much more important for Britain than the Greek bailout earlier this year – in which only members of the eurozone were forced to contribute.
One said: ‘It’s not in our interests to see Ireland get into trouble.’
The idiocy of the semi-nationalisation of the likes of RBS without first putting it through bankruptcy now becomes clear:
Royal Bank of Scotland is also under threat since the state-owned bank has £53billion of exposure to Irish loans, more than £40billion of which are underwritten by British taxpayers.
In other words, the bailout is automatic in this case
Daily Mail
15th November, 2010
Tory MPs today urged David Cameron not to allow British taxpayers’ money to be used to bail out crisis-hit Ireland.
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Posted in UK economy | Tagged: no new bailout | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on November 16, 2010
The “UK economy” is largely a fiction, a spending bubble which is coming to an end- it is already beyond stimulus and requires total reconstruction from the base. QE will be directed at purchasing the kind of “assets” that RBS is desperately hawking at knockdown prices and UK government bonds which China will likely be minded to ditch after Cameron’s comments in Beijing. As before the money will spread around the world in search of higher interest rates and returns in a final frenzy of parasitism.
Telegraph
16th November, 2010
The “most likely” outcome at the end of 2013 is that the UK’s real gross domestic product will remain about 6pc below its pre-crisis trend, said Martin Weale, a member of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC).
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Posted by seumasach on November 16, 2010
RBS owns the Ulster Bank in Ireland and Lloyds offshoot HBOS went on a mad expansion spree in Ireland at the peak of the credit boom in 2005.
Now we can see why Cameron is so keen on an EU bailout of Ireland- with £143 bullion invested in Ireland, much of it directly into Ireland’s collapsing property market, it would be to a large extent a bailout of Britain’s banks. This is in any case inevitable given the collapse of our own economy and property market, but it would be a coup for the City if they could get the EU to cough up for a large chunk of it. The EU has yet to deal with the “British question”- the fact that they have left their western flank exposed to city of London financial operations. This could be an opportunity to do so. Interesting that after the rebuff of the Obama/Cameron offensive in Seoul, the focus turns immediately to the euro rather than to the infinitely more vulnerable pound and dollar.
Alex Brummer
Daily Mail
16th November, 2010
No one in Britain can look at the rapidly unfolding Irish financial crisis with any kind of calm because the UK and Irish banking systems – and the countries’ wider economies – are inextricably bound together.
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Posted in Battle for Europe, UK economy | Tagged: no new bailout | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on November 14, 2010
RBS’s Ulster Bank unit had 37.8 billion pounds of loans in Ireland, including 21.4 billion pounds of mortgages at the end of the third quarter, the bank said last week
Business Week
11th November, 2010
Nov. 11 (Bloomberg) — Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, Britain’s biggest government-owned lender, dropped in London trading because of investor concern about 42.2 billion pounds ($68 billion) of loans to Ireland, according to MFGlobal Securities Ltd. analyst Shailesh Raikundlia.
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Posted by seumasach on November 13, 2010
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Posted by seumasach on November 9, 2010
Telegraph
9th November, 2010
Property-related borrowing and lending between financial institutions helped the collected debt of households, businesses and government balloon from roughly twice gross domestic product (GDP) in 1987 to around 5.4 times by 2009, when total debt stood at £7.5 trillion, according to the report.
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Posted by seumasach on November 4, 2010
A good article by Pilger, but he is certainly wrong about one thing: Britain is utterly bankrupt. The comparison with 1945 is facile: Britain then still had a substantial industrial base and had a powerful position internationally allied with the USA. Now both have eroded almost completely. Britain is bankrupt at every level, personal, local, corporate and national, a dire situation which it makes worse through its aggressive stand off against the rest of the world. Standing defiantly alone will get us nowhere. Thirty years of Thatcherism have wrecked the place and it will take thirty years to rebuild it, a task that can only be accomplished in collaboration with Europe, China and other creditors. This involves a major strategic shift away from imperialism which in the form of the pound/dollar reserve currency racket has been the basis of our prosperity in the last 20 years. The cuts will precipitate the collapse of Britain’s parasitic “consumer economy”; not making the cuts will start a run on the pound and hyperinflationary burn out. Pilger and the left are deluding themselves about the depth of the crisis so they can go on as ever making mindless, mock-heroic exhortations. Trying to link national reconstruction with multipolarity I have outlined a programme for the end of empire.
John Pilger
ICH
3rd November, 2010
These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy may seem unattainable. I don’t think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spread sheet.
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Posted in Financial crisis, Multipolar world, UK economy | 7 Comments »
Posted by seumasach on October 21, 2010
Why “if”?- the cuts will lead to a slump as surely as night follows day. And quantitative easing will go ahead leading to further capital outflows and ultimately to an inflationary tsunami as the pound sinks and commodity prices are driven up. Altogether, blindly to the abyss!
Business Week
21st October, 2010
Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) — Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne signaled that he’s counting on Bank of England Governor Mervyn King to temper any economic slump that might be triggered by the government’s deficit-reduction effort.
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Posted by smeddum on October 18, 2010
Monday October 18 2010
Irish independent
‘WE were on the brink of bankruptcy,” said the UK chancellor George Osborne yesterday as he tried to defend his draconian package of spending cuts and tax rises which will be revealed in detail on Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Drive to Global War, Financial crisis, UK economy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on October 17, 2010
Damned if we cut, damned if we don’t.
There is no alternative: Britian needs to fundamentally change its relationship with the rest of the world, especially our creditors, if we are to begin to emerge from this crisis.
17th October 2010 –
Two Circles
By IRNA,
London : British trade unions are making a last minute appeal against the scale of public spending cuts due to be announced by the government next week by calling on MPs to speak out about the damage they will cause to the country. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by seumasach on October 2, 2010
This ties in with the mad press campaign to convince Brits that the crisis is over. In fact, it is coming to a head and this is desperate panicky stuff in the face of the imminent collapse of consumer spending, the engine of our consumer economy.
Fiona Walsh
Irish Times
29th September, 2010
SPEND, SPEND, spend! That was the extraordinary exhortation earlier this week from the normally staid Charlie Bean, deputy governor of the Bank of England, as he urged savers to loosen their purse strings for the good of the British economy.
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In These New Times 