LATEST POSTS It will be difficult for the Bank of England to do more QE (Photo: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty) If you receive benefits, tax credits or a public sector pension, you’ll be relieved to learn that CPI inflation remained at a stubbornly high 3.1 per cent in September. Relieved, because in the June Budget, the Chancellor, George Osborne, announced he was indexing the pension and other benefits to the Consumer Price Index, rather than as in the past the Retail Prices Index or the Rossi Index (the latter of which has been used to uprate means tested benefit). The September… Read More Furniture is carried out during an eviction in Thornton, Colorado (Photo: Getty Images/John Moore) Anyone who thought the American housing crisis was starting to abate should think again. In fact it threatens to enter a new, and possibly even more destructive phase. The cause is growing foreclosure abuse. This has already prompted Bank of America and JP Morgan to call a moratorium on foreclosures. The White House is under growing pressure to extend this to a nationwide ban. Good news, you might say, and indeed on one level it is. Mortgage servicers (loan sharks to you and me)… Read More The How fair is Britain? report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission has found that full-time female workers still earn 16.4 per cent less than men and that after 30 years of narrowing, that gap appears to have stalled. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, IMF managing director (Photo: AFP/GETTY) Few IMF communiques are good for anything other than providing tomorrow’s fish and chip paper, but even by its own gloriously low standards, the International Monetary Fund has managed to surpass itself with its latest statement. Such a meaningless load of waffle is hard to recall. Even Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF’s managing director, appeared embarrassed by it. “The language is ineffective”, he said, “and the language won’t change things. Policy has to be adapted”. Then again at a press conference I’ve just sat in on, he said: “The problem is that we can talk and talk. What we… Read More Osborne could do more on housing benefit (Photo: Alamy) Currency wars, what to do about US joblessness, even reform of the IMF’s voting structure – it must all seem somewhat irrelevant to George Osborne. The UK chancellor is out here in Washington for his first annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund. I’m not saying he’s not enjoying the hurly burly of meetings with the world’s elite of economic policy making. I’m sure he is. Getting to sit on the top table of global governance is one of the main objects of political ambition. And for him, right now, it’s a learning process – getting…Read More Alan Johnson, the new shadow chancellor. (Photo: PA) Alan Johnson is a good bloke by most accounts, but I fear he will be hopelessly out of his depth as shadow chancellor. He was briefly business secretary at one point under the last Labour Government, and he was as unimpressive in the job as he was plainly uninterested in it. He had no feel for business, and little understanding of its needs. There’s no reason to believe he’ll be any better at getting to grips with the big economic issues of our age. But maybe that’s the point. Having messed up the economy and the… Read More Could the annual meetings taking place this weekend in Washington of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank be Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s last as the IMF’s managing director? Mr Strauss-Kahn, a prominent French socialist, remains tight lipped on his intentions, but if the polls keep moving in his direction, he may soon be quitting to fight Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency. His term at the IMF doesn’t finish until 2012, but he would need to quit well before then to put up a credible fight. That would create a vacancy. Is Gordon Brown, the former British Prime Minister, in with a shot? The job was his for the taking back in 2007. Blair could have engineered it for him. But he…Read More How will David Cameron fill the gap in the economy left by cuts to the public sector? (Photo: Reuters) David Cameron’s speech to the Tory faithful reiterated the need for aggressive measures to reduce the deficit, taking credit, as George Osborne did on Monday, for restoring confidence in the economy. I think he has won that argument for now, partly because there is growing evidence from other countries that reducing spending will do more to help than to damage growth prospects. But given the squeals of… Read More George Osborne (Photo: PA) Very good speech, but where’s the beef? I’m not talking about deficit reduction or welform reform. Not much to argue with there in what George Osborne had to say to the Conservative Party Conference. The tone of the rhetoric was also good, and in marked contrast to last year when he had nothing but pain to offer the electorate. This time, it was sunlit uplands he wanted to focus on once we’ve come through the hard work of clearing up Labour’s mess. Britain can be made great again, he promised. But how? Beyond the platitudes there was little in the way of substance. There…Read More George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Pic: PA George Osborne opened his speech to the Tory party conference by saying that there is good news and bad news. There certainly is. Scrapping child benefit for households in which at least one person earns £44,000 is painful for middle class families which are already being squeezed, particularly since it isn’t very long since we were assured that child benefit would be preserved. This morning, I heard Iain Duncan Smith explain that “we are adjusting it”, but that it is being preserved, but of course the fact that it is being preserved for other… Read MoreEconomics
Stubbornly high inflation dashes hopes of more QE
US 'Robo foreclosures' threaten new financial meltdown
Is there really still a gender pay gap?
IMF fails to agree on anything
Osborne to target further savings from housing benefit?
Johnson the wrong choice for shadow chancellor
Could Brown be in with a shot for top IMF job?
David Cameron can't just cut his way to growth
George Osborne fails to articulate growth strategy
George Osborne: the incentives are there but where are the jobs?
Sunday, 17 October 2010
OCTOBER 12TH, 2010 17:09
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OCTOBER 12TH, 2010 16:16
OCTOBER 11TH, 2010 12:00
There is some additional detail on this gap:
The gender pay gap is lowest for the under 30s, rising more than five-fold by the time workers reach 40. It is influenced by a number of factors: lower pay in sectors where women are more likely to choose careers, the effect of career breaks and limited opportunities in part-time work. The level of earnings penalty is strongly mediated by levels of education but… Read More
OCTOBER 9TH, 2010 20:56
OCTOBER 9TH, 2010 17:57
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