The Bank of England announced last week that their figures for April showed lending figures dropping sharply in the biggest fall since December. Business lending was down £3 billion and small business lending was down by £660 million. These figures are particularly disappointing for small businesses because the government are supposed to be doing everything…
Even with the largest one-day fall in a year, the FTSE 100 was able to continue the impressive record of gains for 12 consecutive months by finishing strongly on Friday night to close out May. This is it’s longest ever consecutive winning streak. How much of this do you think is due to quantitative easing…
This economic recovery seems to be particularly fragile in the UK, despite it now being five years since the original crash. The stock market jitter last week served as a reminder that it probably would not take much to derail the economy once again. We can’t predict where the next shock will happen – it…
The British Retail Consortium (BRC) has revealed that cash is still the king when it comes to UK retail sales. In an analysis of 10 billion retail payments in 2012 (accounting for 60% of total sales), cash was the preferred method of payment for 54%. But worryingly, the amount of transactions and money spent was…
According to a study reported by the Daily Mail, it seems like our increasingly digital world is causing us to collectively retreat into our shell in terms of social interactions. Forty per cent of the people surveyed felt as if small talk about things like the weather was simply pointless and awkward. One third of…
The official economic figures from the Office for National Statistics for the first quarter of 2013 are in and they were exactly as expected when estimated last month – a growth of 0.3%. This has meant that the UK has avoided the dreaded triple-dip recession that we all feared. But we are not exactly out…
Worrying news from China on Wednesday suggesting a slowdown in manufacturing has already made a worldwide impact on stocks and shares worldwide. London, Frankfurt and Paris all closed down 2% and in Asia, Japan closed down 7% having slipped to a low of 10% at one point. The Chinese slowdown is compounded by fears on…
Low fuel prices in April have caused a lower than expected inflation rate and as a result the value of the Pound has fallen. Inflation unexpectedly fell to 2.4% from 2.8% in March and inflation as measured by the retail price index (RPI) fell to 2.9% in April from 3.3% the previous month. Despite the…
In Sir Mervyn King’s final quarterly inflation report as the governor of the Bank of England, he has predicted modest economic growth for the remainder of 2013 and also a fall in inflation. The rise in growth for the second quarter of 2013 is likely to be 0.5%, which will add to the 0.3% growth…
Unemployment figures increased by 15,000 in the three months to the end of March, which means that the period of falling unemployment has now come to an end. Pay growth has also slowed considerably at the lowest rate since 2009 and – if bonuses are ignored – these are actually the worst figures since the…
