Joe Rennison
HSBC’s £10bn of ring-fence fears for UK banks
That ring-fencing idea — it’s just posturing, right? Right?
No?
We don’t know but a report out Wednesday by HSBC says we should take it very seriously given its broad political support.
And it looks like the markets are also doing so on Thursday:
Vox populi, vox debita
There’s a great Bloomberg survey of American voters on the economy out on Wednesday, with the results throwing up some striking stuff pre-FOMC.
Bloomberg’s reckons it’s all a deeply gloomy perspective on the recovery.
The difficulty of defining domestic inflation
Have you heard? High inflation is OK. Or rather, increasing the Bank Rate wouldn’t do much to solve it at this time.
It’s not really news if you’ve been watching recent justifications for UK monetary policy,
A claimant count quandry
There is a bit of a debate developing regarding Wednesday’s employment data and in particular the significant increase in the claimant count.
For example, FT Alphaville quoted Howard Archer of IHS Global Insight saying:
Britain’s Generation U pops up again
Not to put a downer on Wednesday’s news of the sharpest fall in UK unemployment for a decade but…
… the more we look at it, the more we’re finding reasons to be sceptical. Mostly regarding the post-crisis fate of Generation Y.
A tale of two UK inflations
Here’s something to throw the Bank of England’s will to withstand high UK inflation (and low interest rates) in surprising, sharp relief.
It’s a new finding by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, connected to a study of inflationary effects on low-income households over the long term:
Googling the British economy
In a world where hedge funds are using Twitter as a trading strategy… It was only a matter of a time before a central bank started using Google seriously for forecasts.
Or as the Bank of England is quite naffly calling it — ‘nowcasts’.
Painting Portugal’s debt decline
Courtesy of Tradeweb data (and via FT Alphaville’s rubbish MS Paint skills) here’s a chart of those dying peripheral bond trading volumes in 2011, as reported by the FT on Monday:
Greece, flatlining.