The Bank of England recently published the trends for lending for January 2012. They show that: The major UK lenders are Banco Santander, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide and Royal Bank of Scotland and together they accounted for around … 45% of the stock of consumer credit.
Posts under ‘Finance’
Asking the right questions about the payday lending industry
Feb 29th, 2012 by Carl Packman.It’s amazing what you can find on the internet sometimes. Just looking around I found an American-based website offering people toolkits on how to create their own payday lending business. In big, bold capitals one of the headers reads: “You can make a tremendous amount of money in the payday loan business and help people […]
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Iceland recovers but offers little hope to Greece
Feb 27th, 2012 by Mark Seddon.Iceland, a small, rocky outpost in the North Atlantic and home to just over 318,000 people is not a country that easily makes international headlines. But back in the 1970s, Iceland was a staple feature of the nightly news in the UK at least, as that country’s small navy did its best to repulse British […]
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Something on income mobility to consider
Feb 22nd, 2012 by Carl Packman.I am currently reading a book called Changing Fortunes by Stephen Jenkins and one of the main findings in the book notes that around one fifth of the UK population are poor at any one time – that’s the same as in Saudi Arabia. (The figure confirms, though, that this is a static figure – see here) […]
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Are we in a household debt crisis?
Feb 16th, 2012 by Carl Packman.During the middle of last year, Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein noted that rather than beating around the bush, he would call “what we’re in [now, in the US] a “household-debt crisis,” or something more elegant that gets the same idea across”. The reason being that household debt to GDP ratio are dangerously high, banks aren’t […]
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As the cuts bite and growth stagnates, who will challenge our reckless bankers?
Feb 6th, 2012 by Ann Pettifor.The humiliation of Fred Goodwin may have appeased a public baying for vengeance, but has done little to fix the broken global banking system or reverse the Second Great Depression. But then the public have been given very little leadership as to how to address the causes of this crisis. Politicians, economists, central bankers and […]
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Kid gloves for the Banks and throw the poor on the street?
Feb 2nd, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Businesses need funding fast, so why doesn’t Osborne just order RBS and Lloyds to ratchet up the lending? After all, he controls 80% of the former and 40% of the latter, more than those who talked about seizing the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy ever dreamed of. Why instead does he go cap in hand […]
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The cause of the slump is still misunderstood
Jan 26th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.The news that the public sector net debt has now passed the £1 trillion mark isn’t really news since it’s long been on track to reach £1.4 trillion by 2014. What is far more disturbing is that the government, in its obsession to cut the public sector deficit regardless, has completely ignored the impact this […]
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Why does Labour find sado-masochism so appealing?
Jan 9th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.It is astonishing that sado-masochism, so beloved of the English upper classes in their sexual antics, is so infectious in the Labour Party, albeit in a very different context. There seems to be an obsession in some sections of the party that once the Tories go down the route of self-destructive austerity, we must at […]
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Time to man the bulwark
Jan 4th, 2012 by Mark Drakeford.In its first full year of government, elements in the approach to the Welsh economy adopted by the coalition administration in Westminster have become much clearer. For the main part, Wales features only as an object of collateral damage in the wider pursuit of neo-conservative economic policy. This aspect gathered particular pace in the final […]
