Ross Clark

It wasn't long ago that supermarkets stood accused of selling food too cheaply. Their price wars and two-for-the-price-of-one deals were destroying farmers, undermining local shops and making us fat. How long ago that now seems, with the government now considering 1970s-style price controls. While the measures would apparently be voluntary, they would fix the prices of a number of basic foodstuffs – the sort which Jack Monroe keeps her eyes on. The price of price-fixing is likely to be more pictures of empty shelves, which of course will be blamed on Brexit You don’t need to have studied economics in any depth to understand the problem with price controls. In a free market, prices settle at the intersection of the supply and demand curves, ensuring that both are kept in balance.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, not at the beginning of the year when the wise and good were confidently predicting that Brexit-bound Britain would turn out to have the worst economy in the developed world in 2023. The UK economy would be contracting, they said, while almost everyone else's expanded. We have had enough of trying to buy clothes online, though we are happy to buy other stuff in this way Now, as Germany descended officially into recession this week, more evidence emerges that Britain, so far, has avoided the same fate. The Office for National Statistics' retail figures for April show that sales volumes were up 0.5 per cent on the month. This needs to be read in conjunction with March’s figures, which were revised downwards to a fall of 1.

Is there anything that might cause the much-predicted crash in UK house prices? Not – evidently – a pandemic (which perversely caused prices to surge). A sharp, upwards jerk in the Bank of England’s base rate to 4.5 per cent didn't do it either.    The latest edition of the Office for National Statistics's UK House Price Index – the most comprehensive of house prices indices, but which tends to trail Halifax and Nationwide – shows that prices rose by an average of 4.1 per cent in the 12 months to March. That is down from 5.8 per cent in February and is lower than inflation, indicating a real-terms fall in house prices. But it hardly represents a crash.

The decline of the UK stock market has finally reached the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). It has proposed to deregulate it in order to attract more companies to list in London rather than do as, for example, UK-based chip-maker ARM is doing and choosing to list in New York (it was once a UK-listed company before being bought out by the Japanese Softbank and is now being refloated).   The FCA has proposed that the London market become more tolerant of dual share structures – where, for example, a start-up might float on the stock exchange but retain a ‘golden share’ to ensure that the founders remain in full control over non-voting shareholders.

Are BP’s profits of $5 billion in the first quarter of this year really the ‘unearned, unexpected windfalls of war’, as Ed Miliband asserted this morning? The idea that any oil company’s profits are unearned must come as news to the geologists and engineers who are employed in the tricky business of exploring and drilling for oil. You might claim that oil traders sometimes make unearned profits, but surely not the oil companies which extract the stuff from the ground – a business which involves large amounts of capital and vast numbers of hours of human effort. BP certainly can’t be accused of profiting from Covid.

Can a banking crisis really be going this well? After a week of panic withdrawals and a crashing share price, the First Republic Bank in the US will be taken over nearly in its entirety by J P Morgan Chase, in a shotgun marriage facilitated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). No depositors will lose money, and most of the bank’s functions will continue uninterrupted – just as they did in the case of HSBC’s takeover of the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank last month.     We have now had four major banking collapses in the space of six weeks, with remarkably little spillover into the economy at large and the misery mostly limited to shareholders in the banks concerned. Otherwise, stock markets have largely escaped collateral damage.