Northern Rock, according to the FTs 28 June edition, ‘surprised the City yesterday by saying it had been caught out by the effect of higher funding (i.e. interest rate) costs…warning that profits would be below forecasts… ‘Adam Applegarth , chief executive said: ‘If anyone had forecast a 70 basis point increase in two-year swap rates […]

19th July will mark ten years since the onset of the East Asian Financial Crisis. My most vivid memory of that crisis was attending the IMF’s annual meeting in Hong Kong in late September, 1997. I watched incredulously as a proposal by arrogant IMF officials to ignore democratic mandates, and economic common sense, and force

This morning, while drinking my cappuccino, caught a glimpse of a story in the Daily Mail – which claims that Eddie George, until not long ago governor of the Bank of England – admitted yesterday to a House of Commons Select Committee that the Bank had played a key role in fuelling the credit/housing bubble….but

Hold on to your assets, says Bob Ivry of Bloomberg (12 March 2007). The deepest housing decline in 16 years is about to get worse. As many as 1.5 million more Americans may lose their homes, another 100,000 people in housing-related industries could be fired, and an estimated 100 additional subprime mortgage companies that lend

In August 2006, when most financial commentators, banks and lenders were asleep at the wheel, I posted a piece on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site predicting that the fall in house sales in Florida and California were canaries in the deep vast coal mine of US credit – and that the impact of a

The nation state is dead, we are told. Boundaries no longer matter. Globalisation is triumphant, and we should all rejoice in a borderless world. Money, trade and information can flow, uninterrupted, from Japan’s capital markets via the ‘carry trade’ to South Africa’s capital markets, where quick and big bucks can be made on the interest

Bought the FT this morning; fear is lurking in the credit markets. There is now talk of pension funds buying into risky credit markets at just the point hedge funds have slyly slithered out of them; of companies – like California’s Fremont General Corp – dangerously exposed to the sub-prime lending market; and, because of

Wolfgang Munchau writes intelligently today for Eurointelligencewarning of three real reasons to panic. One: a US recession is now imminent, and is going to be painful for the global economy; ‘soft landing’ talk is self-serving and reckless; second the threat of a ‘severe financial crisis in the global credit markets’; and third, the failure of

Are the rumbles that started in Florida and the West Coast housing market last year, and that culminated in HSBC’s recent announcement of losses in its sub-prime lending business, turning into the earthquake many of us have long predicted?…Judging from wild swings in both stock and currency markets yesterday and today, reality seems finally to

By Ann Pettifor, Open Democracy, 19th February, 2004 The effect of the London bombs was to aid the powerful and damage the weak. Campaigners for global justice must not be deflected, says Ann Pettifor. Read the rest of this post… read more