Interest rates

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 26 November 2015

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, announced, as part of the Strategic Defence and Security Review, plans for two 5,000-strong ‘strike brigades’ that could respond to terrorist attacks on Britain. Spending on defence would go up by £12 billion, keeping it above 2 per cent of GDP. The estimate for replacing Britain’s four Trident ballistic missile submarines rose from £25 billion to £31 billion. The Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft, scrapped in 2010, would be replaced with nine Boeing P-8s. Aircraft for the Navy’s two new aircraft carriers would be ready by 2023. The government made preparations for a vote in the Commons in favour of Britain bombing Islamic State targets in Syria.

Thursday

Mary Dejevsky

The war on pensioners

Who controls the media in Britain? Depending on your political outlook, you might answer: the Conservatives, the liberal-left chattering classes, Rupert Murdoch or the BBC. But if the coverage of the elderly is anything to go by, then we can perhaps agree on one thing: the headlines are decided by a cohort of 25- to 45-year-olds who believe that other people’s parents and grandparents — a.k.a. Britain’s pensioners — have stolen their future, dashed their dreams and nabbed all the plush property. How else to account for a headline such as ‘No pay rise? Blame the baby-boomers’ gilded pension pots’ and a plethora of articles maintaining that pensioners have ‘never had

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

If the world economy crashes again, blame the central bankers

Like the Christmas pudding sampled by Hercule Poirot at Kings Lacey — but six weeks early — our Spectator Money supplement contains a little treasure in every portion, and perhaps even a priceless gem. I particularly commend the essays by Warwick Lightfoot and Subitha Subramaniam on interest rates, and why central banks have become so hesitant to raise them. In recent days we’ve had an indication from Mark Carney of the Bank of England that UK rates will stay at their current low well into next year, maybe until 2017; in the US, strong job numbers have pumped expectations that the first rate rise for nine years will be delivered

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

This will-they-won’t-they rate-rise saga has dragged on long enough

When news broke last Thursday evening that the US Federal Reserve had decided to keep interest rates on hold, I happened to be surrounded by serious economists representing a range of viewpoints and nationalities. None seemed surprised by the decision, though the media had declared it to be on a knife edge. But I did sense disappointment, not so much because the assembled sages thought technical data pointed to a rise but because the whole will-they-won’t-they saga of the first US rate rise since December 2008 (or March 2009 in the case of UK rates set by the Monetary Policy Committee) now feels as if it has dragged on far

Thursday

The Spectator

Gamblin’ man

When George Osborne visited Sweden, Finland and Denmark  the stock markets of each country promptly fell by about 5 per cent. As soon as he left, they recovered. A coincidence, of course: Osborne’s tour coincided with stock-market jitters, but this nonetheless forced him to look over the precipice — and panic. Britain, he warned, was ‘not immune to what goes on in the world’. Not for the first time, we saw his lips moving but heard Gordon Brown’s voice. ‘We are much better prepared than we would have been a few years ago for this kind of shock,’ he added. If only this were true. As the Chancellor knows, we

Thursday

The Spectator

Bond villains

After working for Bill Clinton, the political strategist James Carville said he had changed his mind about where power really lies. ‘I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope,’ he said. ‘But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.’ By this he meant that every political leader, no matter how powerful or radical, lived in fear of going too far into debt, lest the market hiked up interest rates, tipping the government into collapse. Alas, that’s no longer the case. This magazine ridiculed Gordon Brown for claiming to have ‘put an

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 23 October 2014

Home A hundred firemen could not prevent wooden cooling towers at Didcot B gas-fuelled power station in Oxfordshire from burning down. A consortium said it could power 2.5 million houses in Britain by 2018 with solar energy generated in southern Tunisia. The Bank of England indicated that interest rates would stay low for longer because of a poor outlook for the global economy. Government borrowing rose to £11.8 billion in September: £1.6 billion more than a year earlier. HSBC offered a mortgage at 0.99 per cent interest. The government is to pay a bounty of £55 to GPs for every patient they diagnose with dementia. English hospitals near the Welsh border