FDIC has bailed out seven banks today. This is the highest number of failed banks in a single day ever, and the second week running that the record has been broken.

"UK homeowners repaid a record amount of mortgage debt in the first quarter of the year, in the latest sign that the credit crunch is forcing Britons off a decade-long spending splurge.Britons injected £8.1bn to pay off their mortgage debt in the first three months of 2009, the Bank of England said on Friday, as falling house prices, greater caution and tighter credit conditions prompted a change in habits".

It seems search engine interest in buy-to-let, the sharp end of property interest, has plunged in recent months. So surely that will begin to filter through to the market shortly and snuff out the recent revival, won't it?

I propose a combination of mandatory recapitalisation of the banks and a debt Jubilee for the household sector to remove the two key obstacles to an economic revival.

Posted by devo @ 02:25 PM 11 Comments

Hundreds' of Indian contractors are being brought to the UK by state-backed Lloyds Banking Group, which is using them to slowly replace British IT workers. At the same time Llloyds Banking Group announced the biggest single jobs cull yet under its integration programme as it axed another 2,113 workers, taking the total cuts so far to 7,500.

Posted by phil9134 @ 02:13 PM 16 Comments

Addressing a Treasury Select Committee on his appointment to the interest rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee, Miles said: "Expectations are crucial in the housing market and they look a bit better now than a few months ago. My hunch -- and I put it no stronger than that -- is that we have seen most of the overall aggregate house price falls." If I was his boss at the Monetary Policy Committee, I would have sacked him there and then.

Fred Harrison shares his thoughts on when the housing market is going to recover and why this crash is so different to the 90’s. Views that you won't get from BoE.

Posted by neo-serf @ 12:43 PM 6 Comments

Apparently the banking crisis is over - workers at Goldman Sachs are set to receive record bonuses of £430,000 ($700,000) each this year, totalling £12.2billion Furious reaction has been fired from critics who say that it is this system of lavish bonuses - and the resultant culture of greed - which got the world into the economic mess it is currently languishing in.

Posted by devo @ 09:09 AM 51 Comments

Once you get past Mr Miles and his "hunch" this is quite a balanced article. "So what indeed. In the housing slump of the early 1990s there were 17 months when house prices rose, even though the overall trend was firmly downward – a downwards staircase pattern rather than a ski slope. Most graphs in economics exhibit a certain amount of volatility or "noise". ...... ..Some say the current revival in house prices is simply a function of special factors, such as the release of pent-up demand from cash buyers or those with very large deposits. They have been waiting for signals that the market may have bottomed out and are now taking advantage. However, by their nature, these sorts of buyers are neither very large in number nor a sustainable source of strength for the market......"

Posted by sybil13 @ 07:39 AM 20 Comments

The OECD believe its worse in England than in the USA. In the USA yesterdays massive unemployment news has demonstrated to many leading economists that there are no green shoots at all. We are still deep in recession and its going to get worse without doubt according to Nouriel Roubini who correctly predicted the downturn to begin with. House prices which have already fallen 27% will fall a futher 40% in the USA - so if its worse in England lets hope all the property crazed idiots are bracing themselves for the real down turn most of which is yet to come.