Telegraph blogs
Finance Blog for the Telegraph Media Group
Updated: 53 min 44 sec ago
Ed Miliband has the potential to be a great prime minister
In a short time, I shall be leaving the country for at least two years (stop cheering). When I return, Ed Miliband will be the prime minister. Whether this constitutes an achievement for a Labour leader is open to debate. The legalised gerrymandering which the Coalition parties have, through their mutual dishonesty, ensured will be [...]
Categories: General
The referendum debate may yet have strengthened Cameron's hand in Europe – but Tories should be wary of becoming the Don Quixote of EU politics
There are a lot of issues driving the recent Tory debate over the EU referendum bill including Cameron’s leadership-style, the rise of Ukip – and the related tug-of-war over whether to 'energise the base' or hug the centre, coalition frustration, dwindling conservative membership. All of these are legitimate issues to discuss. Equally, the EU referendum [...]
Categories: General
Why won’t regulators act to end the multi-billion pound scandal of widows without pensions?
Hundreds of thousands of women will die in poverty during the decades ahead because of an irrevocable financial mistake their husbands have made or are about to make. This is a scandal which many people in the City know about but which generates billions of pounds profit for insurance companies, so those in the know [...]
Categories: General
Mark Carney's at risk of looking more Clark Kent than Superman
After 20 years and 82 press conferences, Sir Mervyn King yesterday delivered his last Inflation Report – the innovation he introduced to the Bank of England and arguably its most influential publication. He will appear before MPs one last time and is sure to speak publicly before his 10 year term expires at the end [...]
Categories: General
How you can help free 6m young savers with £5bn trapped in zombie funds
Parents and grandparents who believe it is wrong to take candy from a baby now have the chance to help millions of youngsters getting rotten returns from Child Trust Funds (CTF). The government is belatedly consulting the public about whether it should allow 6.1m children with CTFs worth a total of nearly £5bn to [...]
Categories: General
House prices: first-time buyers surge by 20pc despite predictions of doom
First-time buyer numbers surged by a fifth last month as rising house prices and the end of the mortgage famine prompted more people to escape generation rent. The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) reports that 19,100 loans, worth a total of £2.4 bn, were advanced to first-time buyers in March, while total homeloans increased by [...]
Categories: General
Metropolitan liberals sneer at white, middle-aged Dan Brown. Would they be so scathing if his books were written by an African woman?
Many of the smart-alecks who have taken to print to attack Dan Brown don't write as well as he does. What constitutes good writing? At a very basic level, it's something people can read. I would wager that most of us have, in the last few days, felt our eyes glaze over while reading yet [...]
Categories: General
The UK is up to its neck in debt, but here's the thing: we just don't care
Dominic Raab, Conservative MP for Esher & Walton, has an interesting piece in this morning's Telegraph saying we should be careful not to blame Brussels for our own, home made problems, and in particular excessive indebtedness. Yet a survey by the Office for National Statistics, published this morning, finds that to the extent that we [...]
Categories: General
Dave's operation needs some New Labour thuggery
What Dave needs is some bullies. The politics of the European vote have been brilliantly analysed by Ben Brogan; there is nothing to add on that score. What remains is to ask how the leader of a great nation has allowed this farce to transpire. Any sense of a hierarchy within the Conservative Party and [...]
Categories: General
Retirement in the red: one in 10 pensioners worries about mortgage debt
More than one in 10 pensioners is worried about mortgage debt, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). As rising numbers retire in the red, should we worry about pensioners following the government's lead and living beyond their means? House prices are high and rising but so are the debts attached to bricks and [...]
Categories: General
I am become death, destroyer of worlds
I've been accused by some of irresponsibility for highlighting IMF forecasts which, if right, plainly indicate that Spain is insolvent, and will need a big sovereign/banking debt restructuring at some stage. This leads to the obvious conclusion, spelt out in the headline to my blog, that you should get your money out while you still [...]
Categories: General
Spain is officially insolvent: get your money out while you still can
I'd not noticed this until someone drew my attention to it, but the latest IMF Fiscal Monitor, published last month, comes about as close to declaring Spain insolvent as you are ever likely to see in official analysis of this sort. Of course, it doesn't actually say this outright. The IMF is far too diplomatic [...]
Categories: General
Osborne's damascene conversion
OK, OK, so one swallow does not a summer make and all that, but there have been quite a few of them of late and Thursday's much better than expected industrial production figures are just the latest. I was virtually garotted (figuratively speaking)the other day on these comment boards by all the usual suspects for [...]
Categories: General
David Cameron should ignore Westminster navel-gazing about the EU – and instead beat Europe at its own game
As a British prime minister of Conservative persuasion, what do you do when you’re stuck somewhere between a high-profile Tory ex-Chancellor who says he’d vote to leave the EU, an anti-EU party surging in the polls, a eurozone set for more integration and a whole host of voices in Brussels criticising you for wanting "less [...]
Categories: General
Public morality is in chaos, yet voters crave order
For almost a week, Westminster and the commentariat has tied itself into knots attempting to answer the question of what it is that Ukip voters want. It is an open question with many answers, from Europe to grammar schools to the fact that it is led by a lovable rogue rather than a plump social [...]
Categories: General
Nigel Lawson has done David Cameron a big favour by coming out against Europe
Lord Lawson is to be congratulated for articulating publicly what many senior Conservatives believe – that the European Union is lost to Britain and that the sooner we leave it, the better. The fact that Lawson was once quite closely identified with the Europhile wing of the party – having backed entry into the European [...]
Categories: General
China's attempt to pervert Western institutions
I've been a fierce critic both of the IMF and the World Bank, but I'll defend to the last their right to say what they want about member states. China has been a repeat offender in this regard, having on at least one occasion refusing to allow publication of the full IMF article IV report [...]
Categories: General
The Spanish perspective
Here is my answer to those many critics on this comment thread convinced that my view of Europe's EMU catastrophe is somehow an Anglo-Saxon or Little Englander or – for that matter – a Right-wing perspective. This was the splash yesterday morning on the front page of El Pais, Spain's centre-Left voice and the country's [...]
Categories: General
Britain has learnt that privatisation can be unwise. There is no need to sell our RBS stake
It looks like the government's foray into bank ownership may be coming to an end. Yesterday's FT (£) story that the state's stakes in both Lloyds and RBS could be sold before the 2015 election was apparently franked by the comments of Stephen Hester today. The RBS chief executive announced that the work of making [...]
Categories: General
Bullion slump and the high price of following financial fashion
Investment is as much an art as a science because valuations are based on unpredictable factors, such as the human emotions of fear and greed. So it could prove profitable to examine the colourful artwork above because it illustrates an often-overlooked phenomenon. For technical reasons that baffle me, a bigger version can be seen [...]
Categories: General
The Bottom Line:If Mr Cable has his way...
"If Mr Cable had his way, all the big banks would be broken up and bonuses would be virtually eliminated - a sure-fire way in my view of guaranteeing an end to the UK’s ability to compete as an international financial centre. Let’s not forget that this is a man who is on record as saying that everyone who works in a bank has an ‘aristocratic lifestyle’ clearly demonstrating his lack of understanding of the sector." A tough line on bankers’ bonuses could make a brain drain of financial talent a distinct possibility, warns Paul Marsden. Read more