Posts tagged 'savings'

Cash ISA popularity raises fears

Kate is FT AV’s Asia Correspondent. She joined FT Alphaville in mid-2011 after carrying out various roles in the FT’s London office since 2005: interactive editor, companies reporter, and founding editor of the FT’s Energy Source blog.

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| Aug 02 2011 02:08 | Comment |

Households are putting more money aside in tax-free savings accounts than ever before, despite rising domestic bills and stagnant wage growth. The number of active Individual Savings Accounts (Isas), rose to 15.3m in 2010-11, the highest figure since Isas were first launched in 1999, according to FT analysis of data from HM Revenue & Customs.  Economists said the repercussions for the wider economy could be negative if households were opting to save rather than spend. However, the overall picture on savings is mixed, suggesting it is the relative competitiveness of Isas compared with other forms of saving, which has boosted their take-up.

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This year’s oil bill – $2,400bn according to Morgan Stanley

Tracy Alloway used to be deputy editor of FT Alphaville. Here she learned the details of derivatives, the absurdities of accounting and the various structures of ... erm ... structured finance. She now covers big US banks for the FT paper, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. She pops up on FT Alphaville every once in a while.

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| Apr 14 2011 10:38 | Comment |

Crude oil doesn’t necessarily spring to mind when one thinks of natural wealth redistributors.

Yet in 2010 the transfer of income from oil-importing countries to oil-exporting countries amounted to some $1,600bn — or 2.6 per cent of the importers’ GDP. With oil prices now hovering around $110 a barrel that redistribution will only increase. The barrel bill, so to speak, is about to get bigger. Read more

US families and attitudes toward financial risk

| Mar 28 2011 20:46 | Comment |

What impact did the crisis have on the attitudes of American families toward financial risk?

A paper published last week by the Federal Reserve, and cited in a speech by Elizabeth Duke on Thuesday, begins to answer this question by looking at how US households’ wealth, savings and expectations changed between 2007 and 2009. The researchers conducted a follow-up survey in 2009 of families analysed as part of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) in 2007. Nearly 89 per cent of 2007 participants were re-interviewed. Read more

Richard Koo goes unconventional on China

Tracy Alloway used to be deputy editor of FT Alphaville. Here she learned the details of derivatives, the absurdities of accounting and the various structures of ... erm ... structured finance. She now covers big US banks for the FT paper, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. She pops up on FT Alphaville every once in a while.

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| Feb 17 2011 09:24 | Comment |

Nomura’s Richard Koo — he of ‘balance sheet recession’ fame — has been inspired.

He’s spent a week with Chi Hung Kwan, of the Nomura Institute of Capital Markets Research and an all-around China expert, and come back with the discovery that the “conventional wisdom on [the] Chinese economy has begun to collapse.” Read more

Japan’s savings rate about to go negative, Goldman says

Tracy Alloway used to be deputy editor of FT Alphaville. Here she learned the details of derivatives, the absurdities of accounting and the various structures of ... erm ... structured finance. She now covers big US banks for the FT paper, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. She pops up on FT Alphaville every once in a while.

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| Feb 14 2011 10:18 | Comment |

Japan has just announced that its national savings rate rose to 5 per cent in 2009, from 2.2 per cent in 2008. But already some analysts are predicting a sharp reversal in the trend. Goldman Sachs’ Chiwoong Lee thinks the rate is about to turn negative.

From a Monday note: Read more

Deleveraging and the tax compromise

Cardiff writes mostly about US macroeconomic issues, with daily excursions into other topics about which he claim no expertise. Before Alphaville, Cardiff spent a little more than two years as a reporter at Dow Jones Financial News covering investment banking, asset management, and private equity. Along the way he has written freelance pieces on a variety of other topics from behavioural psychology to Muay Thai, the latter also being a personal interest that involves frequently getting kicked in the shins (and torso, and head).

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| Dec 07 2010 22:52 | Comment |

Given the politics of the moment, the compromise deal on extending the Bush tax cuts was an all-or-nothing proposition. Either Republicans and Democrats would get everything they wanted (of the things that mattered), or everyone would leave empty-handed.

Obviously we ended up with the former. Read more

US and Japanese savings – the quiet reversal

| Mar 26 2009 09:40 | Comment |

One of the most striking shifts in the deployment of capital on the American and Asian  sides of the Pacific has been occurring quietly and with relatively little comment in the past year – a surge in America’s notoriously low savings rates and a slide in Japan’s traditionally stratospheric savings rates.  As the FT reports on Thursday:

US retail investors flee to savings
US retail investors poured close to $250bn (€184bn) into bank accounts in the first months of this year, sharply accelerating a flight to safety as they continued to flee volatile stock markets. Bank savings deposits rose by $246bn to a record $4,343bn in the nine weeks to March 9, according to data from the Federal Reserve. This is more than the whole of 2008, in which savings deposits rose by $229bn. Read more