Matthew Lynn

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 or three years and the same news could make our hearts sink — because by then a mansion tax could well have been introduced, and rising prices will take many middle-class owners over the threshold. The mansion tax bandwagon has been rolling for several years, pushed enthusiastically by business secretary Vince Cable and his Lib Dem colleagues. The idea is that any home worth more than £2 million would be taxed at an annual rate of 1 per cent of its value above the threshold.

The weather might not be what it once was, and the football season might start so quickly it feels like it has hardly been away, but there is one thing everyone can surely agree on about August. Nothing of any importance happens. As we head into the dog days of summer, everyone can sling their feet up on the desk and relax. All the people who really matter — the ones running the big corporations, the banks or the government — are off sunning themselves by a pool somewhere. As for the office, it’s about as busy as a job centre in downtown Athens. The only people left are the post boy and the interns busy updating their Facebook pages. It’s impossible to imagine anything of significance happening.

No Bank of England governor has ever been installed in office with quite so much advance hype as Mark Carney. When he moves from running to the Bank of Canada to his new office in Threadneedle Street, expectations will be running high. Carney arrives with a reputation as a master of economic strategy, a man who can single-handedly steer an economy through the most treacherous of waters, and get a country growing again with a few deft strokes of monetary magic. Certainly, George Osborne has invested his hopes in him. During Carney’s time as governor in Canada, the country was ‘acknowledged to have weathered the economic storm better than any other major western economy’, he said on announcing the appointment.

Josef Ackermann is something of a rarity in big business these days. Speculating last month on the possibility of a woman one day joining his board, the Deutsche Bank chief executive remarked that she might make it ‘more colourful and prettier’. Despite howls of outrage from the sisterhood — or the Schwesternschaft, as they are somewhat scarily called in Germany — what was interesting about the banker’s casual sexism was how odd it sounded rather than how ordinary. Most CEOs these days would rather boast about how their factories pumped millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere than make any remark that could be construed as disparaging to women.

Iceland is recovering from its financial shock – without the aid of a bank bailout It’s been a good week for the admittedly small band of people who get excited about the decisions made by central banks. In America, the Federal Reserve embarked on a second great round of printing money. In this country, the Bank of England abandoned any idea of controlling inflation, leaving interest rates at a three-century low despite having missed its inflation target for seven months. But by far the most interesting decision was made a long way to the north, in a country which people usually only pay attention to when its banks or volcanoes blow up, bringing either the financial or air traffic system grinding to a halt.

This recession is a global ‘mancession’, says Matthew Lynn, with male-dominated industries collapsing and women getting a greater share of new jobs. But if work is turning into a female domain, what are we going to do with all the redundant men? Remember the feminist slogans of the 1970s? Phrases such as ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ and ‘Adam and Even’ sounded comic at the time. Now, 40 years on, they seem less like the absurd hopes of the dungaree-clad sisterhood, and more like shrewd insights into the economic future. The once preposterous-sounding idea that women would outnumber men in the workplace is now a reality. It has just happened in America and, if current trends persist, it will happen in Britain in four years time.

Recessions end. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s, about which we have heard so much recently, eventually ran its course, though it took a world war to get business booming again. ‘Thatcher’s wasteland’ of dole queues, urban riots and closed steel mills in the early 1980s gave way swiftly to a world of rampant yuppies and triumphant admen. But when both the British and the world economy finally emerge, dazed and blinking, from the savage recession now upon us, it will look very different.