Mark carney

Rather more attention was paid last week to the strange position of George Osborne’s feet than to the dark shape lurking behind him. My own theory about his stance on the conference platform is that he was imagining himself as a operatic tenor, belting out an aria in praise the magic elixir he has administered to the formerly consumptive heroine, the UK economy, and pitching to be her next prince. But operas, like political careers, tend to end badly: so why the rumbling bass notes from the orchestra pit, and what is that sinister thing in the shadows? I’m not talking about Corbyn and McDonnell fighting in a sack with

Turn-up. Eat lunch. Swap a few pleasantries with the other people in the room, leave interest rates on hold, and then collect a cheque on the way out. I am starting to wonder why I can’t have a job on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. It certainly doesn’t look terribly difficult. This week, the Bank is making a change to its usual routine. Instead of just announcing the latest monthly decision on rates, it is also releasing a vast amount of fresh information on the economy, in a move that the media have already dubbed ‘Super Thursday’, presumably on the grounds that unlike plain old ordinary Thursdays, City

‘Bank of England says that migrants are holding down wages’ the headlines screamed this morning. Yet Mark Carney, when interviewed on the Today programme this morning, spun a slightly different story. Migrants bear some responsibility for downwards pressure on wages, he said, but not so much as another group of people: British workers in the 50s and 60s who are returning from retirement, or who never retired in the first place. Over the past two years, net migration is up by 50,000, but that number is dwarfed by 300,000 people whom the Bank of England would normally have expected to have retired by now, but who have carried on in

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said: ‘Red warning lights are once again flashing on the dashboard of the global economy.’ He then offered £650 million to a ‘green climate fund’. In a speech in Singapore, Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, said that fines for banks over rigging foreign exchange rates showed that ‘it is simply untenable now to argue that the problem is one of a few bad apples. The issue is with the barrels in which they are stored.’ Official figures showed that the number of British Army reservists has been boosted by a recruitment drive in the past year from 19,290 to 19,310. Friends of the

October is always a turbulent month, and I’m feeling uneasy about this one. The FTSE100 index, which looked set to break through 7,000 in September, has lost more than 500 points since then — and would have lost more but for manoeuvres in the mining sector. Pessimism stalks the bond markets, and even a falling oil price is read more as a harbinger of faltering growth than a stimulus for further recovery. Ebola is the new volcanic ash cloud, and attention is focused on the apparently incorrigible weakness of the eurozone — where the biggest problem is what was long seen as the most potent solution, namely the German economy.

Mark Carney’s hefty hint that interest rates could rise sooner than markets anticipate is politically awkward but important, as until they do so, we shall have very little idea of how much of the recovery is based simply on cheap debt and how much of it is real. The car industry and house sales, for instance, benefit from ultra-low interest rates, and while they appear to be booming, it’s not clear how much of that boom is pushed by the bellows of cheap debt. What’s more, the current situation punishes those who are doing exactly what the government wants them to do. When he announced the ‘savings revolution’ in this

Home Demand for housing posed ‘the biggest risk to financial stability’ according to Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England. House prices rose by 8 per cent in the year to the end of March, according to the Office for National Statistics, and in London the increase was 17 per cent. The annual rate of inflation rose to 1.8 per cent in April from 1.6 per cent in March, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index; it remained at 2.5 per cent as measured by the Retail Prices Index. The underlying annual profits of Marks & Spencer fell by 3.9 per cent to £623 million, putting them behind

At the beginning of the last decade, a young man who claimed to be my ‘premier banker’ paid me a visit. He was accompanied by his boss, evidently there to assess the junior’s performance. Once upon a time — at least in popular imagination — bank managers were kindly, cautious, long-term advisers, but by the turn of the new century they had become shameless product-pushers with targets to fill, and it was obvious from the body language of both visitors that this poor chap had to sell me something by the end of the call or his job was on the line. So I took his ‘advice’, signed for a

I thought it obvious that Mark Carney’s trip to Scotland yesterday was a bad day for Alex Salmond and the Scottish nationalists. Sure, the governor of the Bank of England said, a currency union between Scotland the the rump UK could happen and be made to work but it would be fraught with difficulty and sacrifice too. Do you really want to do that? How lucky do you feel? Carney, being a Canadian and therefore a man crippled by politeness, did not add “punk”. In response the SNP were reduced to pushing a meaningless poll which found 70% of Britons favouring a currency union after independence. That is, 70% of

Car sales are up 11pc, making the FT splash this morning. House prices are soaring again, up 8pc last year. And the British Chamber of Commerce has this morning released its Q4 survey showing a startling surge in investment, orders and employment (graph, above). Good news for George Osborne’s plan for a ‘balanced’ recovery: manufacturers’ capacity use, confidence and employment difficulties are at the highest since the survey began in 1988. The upshot, as Citi says (pdf) is that the UK economy will likely grow far faster this year than Osborne’s cautious official expectation. He will most likely have another healthy upgrade to announce in his next budget. Citi expects

Mark Carney’s speech to the Economics Club of New York yesterday made clear that very low interest rates now ‘put a premium on macroprudential policies’. Translation: he’s not going to hike interest rates soon, but he wants us to know that there are other levers he can pull to keep the UK economy on track. What are those levers? First, Funding for Lending. Two weeks ago Mark Carney announced that the scheme – which offers banks cheap funding if they increase lending to the real economy – would no longer be available for mortgage lending. It will only be open for loans to companies. That’s a lot more than just