How important were all those initiatives the government kept announcing?

There was a time when the government seemed to be announcing new measures to get the economy and the banking sector in particular moving again on an almost daily basis. Today, the Wall Street Journal has done a rather good audit of these measures. For instance, in January “the British government created a guarantee program meant to revive the dormant market for asset-backed securities. The program aims to spur purchases of banks' asset-back securities, or bundled consumer loans, by guaranteeing them for buyers. The guarantees were made available in April, but since then,...

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Brown's big lie

How long can a Prime Minister in a democracy lie to his country and get away with it? Gordon Brown is trying to find out.  His Big Lie - that his published plans do not involve a cut in public services - would not have withstood a Spending Review, which would have spelled out departmental budgets from April 2011-April 2014. So, it has been postponed.

Current sending is being run on budgets set out in the 2007 review (itself delayed) which lasts until 2010-11. Since it was drafted the forecast for 2010-11...

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The case for pessimism

Amid all the talk of green shoots and renewed economic growth, Vince Cable and Martin Wolf pop up today to warn that the nightmare is, potentially, far from over.  

Of the two, Wolf's is the more useful article; linking, as it does, to a paper by the economic historians Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O'Rourke, entitled A Tale of Two Depressions.  I recommend that all CoffeeHousers check that paper out, as the graphs in it are, as Wolf puts it, "worth more than a thousand words". They suggest that - across a range of indicators, from...

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It's ending in America

As the whole expenses scandal rumbles on, the economic crisis has been knocked off the front pages. But it hasn’t gone away. Today there’s an interesting article in the Washington Post saying that while the worst is over in America, the recession in Europe will be longer and deeper. (The numbers the Post mentions about Britain are particularly grim). Here are the key paragraphs of the article:

“Nine months into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the free fall in the United States appears to be giving way to a

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