A day at Wimbledon This week, Mervyn King, the long-standing Governor of the Bank of England, said about the 2008 financial crisis, ‘We should have shouted from the rooftops that a system had been built in which banks were too important to fail, that banks had grown too […]

Yesterday mortgage rates rose. In normal times, that wouldn’t really be news. Sometimes interest rates rise, sometimes they fall. Sometimes savers lose, sometimes borrowers do. Swings and roundabouts. Only – have you noticed? – these aren’t normal times. The Bank of England’s main lending rate has been glued to 0.5% for more than three years […]

      Facebook is a phenomenal company. Mark Zuckerberg is a remarkable man and an astonishing entrepreneur. He’s created something sensational — something genuinely world-changing — and he’s young enough to be my son. But Facebook the company is one thing. The mooted valuation of Facebook is quite another. I admire the first, and […]

Let’s not be too hard on George Osborne. He came into office with what was arguably a more difficult bundle of challenges than any incoming Chancellor had ever faced. Facing a challenge: George Osborne Flaky banks, a hideous deficit, soaring debts, public services that had become hooked on ladlefuls of new cash, and an economy […]

Regular readers of Planet Ponzi will remember that I’ve got a thing about inflation. You know: inflation is bad, printing money makes more of it, isn’t it about time we stopped making a bad problem worse? Trouble is, though, constant repetition of a theme gets boring after a while. Yes, fuel prices are up. Yes, […]

The financial turmoil of recent years has produced an outpouring of op-eds, news stories, books and essays seeking to document and analyze the unfolding disaster. Some of the material has been written by insiders, some by those from the outside. Some by experts, some by astonished laypeople. It’s a mass of material which can, remarkably, […]

  ‘Inflation falls.’ That’s the headline countless British consumers have been longing to see. And inflation isn’t just falling: the Bank of England predicts that prices rises will be down as low as 1.7% some time later this year. If that’s true, it’ll be a blessed relief for countless consumers. Personally, though, I’m just about […]

OK. We know the picture. Europe is in crisis. Italy shivers on the brink of default. The United States has an utterly unsustainable deficit and politicians who can neither rationalize taxes nor cut entitlements. Banks are overleveraged and have their books stuffed with low grade assets. Their capital buffers are made up of nonsenses such […]