Matthew Lynn is a financial columnist and author of ‘Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis’ and ‘The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031’
There are queues outside the money exchanges as we desperately try and swap our worthless pounds for euros. The Red Cross are flying in food parcels. The IMF is arranging an emergency aid package, whilst house prices are in freefall and interest rates are soaring. If you cast your mind back only a few weeks,
Plunging output. The FTSE in freefall. A financial collapse. Unemployment rising rapidly and trade falling off a cliff. At first glance, you might think that was an accurate description of the British economy, given the decisions that the Bank of England took this morning. After all, to cut interest rates to their lowest level in
A stable government, led by a good-looking modernising liberal. A free trade agreement that gives it unrestricted access to the largest economic bloc in the world. Rising prices and a return to growth. There must be times when the Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney wishes he was still in charge of the
Share prices in freefall. Pension funds obliterated. A sea of red ink across trading screens. Billions wiped off the value of leading companies. And brokers, or at least the automated trading algorithms that have replaced them, contemplating throwing themselves out of the window, or whatever exactly it is that an algorithm does when it has
It is four o’clock on Friday morning. The early returns suggest Leave is edging ahead. You’ve just seen a tweet that Peter Mandelson has fled the country, and that Boris Johnson has been seen pencilling in the names of his cabinet. What is the first thing you do? Rush down to Sainsbury’s and stock up
Unelected. Technocratic. Exercising a great deal of power over people’s lives, without much in the way of accountability. Staffed by well-meaning, over-educated experts, big on theories and short on experience, and run by a smooth globe-trotting boss who is immaculately plugged into the Davos set. It is not hard to see why the Bank of
Just after last year’s general election, George Osborne delivered a budget that he hailed as proof that his policies were working. ‘The British economy I report on today is fundamentally stronger than it was five years ago,’ he crowed, as he started to detail the record number of jobs created and a growth rate that
The queues haven’t started forming outside branches in Frankfurt or Cologne yet. Even so, it is hard not to suspect that something is badly amiss at Deutsche Bank, Germany’s and indeed Europe’s mightiest financial institution, and the rock on which that economy is founded. The shares have been in freefall, and executives have been wheeled
Scrapping the cuts to tax credits. Ring-fencing health care, and spending a few billion on a high-speed rail link from London to Birmingham. Despite all the howls of outrage from the left about austerity, for a country that was meant to be broke, we have a government that still throws around a lot of cash.
If anyone is feeling pleased about the slide on the stock-market today, it is probably Andrew Roberts, the RBS analyst who hit the headlines this week with a note advising everyone to ‘sell everything’. Probably rather sooner than he expected, and before any of his clients even had time to panic properly, prices have started
The iPhone had not yet been launched. Sven-Goran Eriksson was still managing the England football team. A 17-year-old Taylor Swift had just had her first hit. Plenty has changed since June 2006, but one thing has remained remarkably constant – the cost of money. In the nine years since then, the Federal Reserve has cut
Just about anyone, except it seems for the Bank of England’s forecasting department, could have seen this one coming. When the Bank’s Governor Mark Carney decided to bundle a stack of fresh data on the state of the economy into a single ‘Super Thursday’ package released every three months, someone could have checked the calendar and
Turn-up. Eat lunch. Swap a few pleasantries with the other people in the room, leave interest rates on hold, and then collect a cheque on the way out. I am starting to wonder why I can’t have a job on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. It certainly doesn’t look terribly difficult. This week,
Ten years ago, the Greek minister Yainnos Papantoniou came to London to give a talk at the London School of Economic on the country’s first four years as a member of the euro. A skilled, pro European technocrat, Papantoniou had, more than anyone else, steered his country through dogged German resistance into the single currency.
It was 2 May 1997. Not only was most of the country celebrating the election of a bright young Kennedy-esque Prime Minister called Tony Blair, so too, perhaps more surprisingly, were the champagne-swilling Thatcherites of the City of London. As the government took office, the FTSE 100 index climbed up to 4,455, and it was
Teenagers have never exactly been short of things to complain about to their parents. You didn’t give them enough support, sent them to the wrong schools, stopped them going to the right parties, or didn’t get them the latest iPhone. But Generation Rent, perhaps stirred up by too much time spent reading Ed Miliband’s Twitter
There were no fireworks, and not much champagne. Indeed, it wasn’t an anniversary that many people noticed. But on 9 March, the bull market in equities was five years old. It was on that day back in 2009 that the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the key global benchmark for stocks, edged down another 80 points
It might not be something you want to mention in the Half Moon Inn in Balcombe, or around any of the other communities where people are getting anxious about shale gas explorers ripping up the countryside with their drills and pipelines. But if shale is the tremendous source of wealth that David Cameron insists it
There are few things most of us enjoy more than watching the value of our houses rocket. Every homeowner will have felt the pulse of excitement that comes from a mental calculation of how much has been added to their net worth by the latest bulletin from Rightmove or the Halifax. Yet fast forward two
What’s the most surprising thing that could come out of the current economic upturn? A rapid revival in northern manufacturing? The City really getting behind small British businesses? Ed Balls admitting higher public spending wasn’t always the best way to promote growth? Any of these eventualities would be fairly amazing. But the biggest surprise would
