Will the recession end on Friday 23th October

Will the UK be out of recession from Friday 23rd October, or will the financial and  fiscal  results show we are still very much in recession.

Lets wait and see. (the answer is no)

Record recession for UK economy

The UK economy unexpectedly contracted by 0.4% between July and September, according to official figures, meaning the country is still in recession.

Retail sales were flat in September, which did not help overall growth

It is the first time UK gross domestic product (GDP) has contracted for six consecutive quarters, since quarterly figures were first recorded in 1955.

But the figures could still be revised up or down at a later date, because this figure is only the first estimate.

GDP measures the total amount of goods and services produced by a country.

Filed under: blog, British Goverment, Changing recession, 23rd of October, business, end of recession, end of UK recession, news, UK, UK economy, will the UK be out of recession soon

Full impact of recession yet to hit UK public sector, study claims

Research says that effects of downturn will not hit some parts of Britain for several months – and that local councils need to prepare for this ‘aftershock’

 

The full cost of the worst global downturn since the second world war has yet to hit Britain’s local and central government finances, new research reveals .

Analysis by data company Experian shows that the recession – in terms of unemployment, debt, fraud and increasing demand for public services – will not hit some areas of the UK for another seven months and, in some places, will be felt for many years after growth resumes.

Experian found that the south, from Kent through to Cornwall, was feeling the least impact from the recession; the midlands, Wales and the north-east the severest impact; with Scotland between the two extremes.

Local authority areas that would be hit hardest, it said, were Blaenau Gwent, Kingston-upon-Hull, Inverclyde, Glasgow and Wolverhampton. Areas that would suffer the least included the City of London, Kensington and Chelsea, and Westminster.

Charlotte Hogg, managing director of Experian, said: “The tremors of the recession may have been felt in many households and businesses, but local and central government now needs to brace itself for the aftershock.

“So far, the public sector has been cushioned by government investment and spending. But with unemployment rising, revenues falling and the need for public spending cuts, local authorities need to think how they can do more for less.”

Over the next 10 years, Experian expects London, Edinburgh and Leeds, as well as a number of other major northern cities, to prosper the most. However, many Scottish locations such as Dumfries and Galloway, East Dunbartonshire, South Ayrshire and Argyll and Bute as well as English local authorities including Copeland, Malvern Hills, Weymouth and Portland, West Somerset and Stafford will take much longer to recover from recession due to persistent unemployment and deprivation problems.

According to the research, the people who will experience the greatest levels of financial stress are young single people on limited incomes who rent small flats from local councils or housing associations, and older pensioners who have found their retirement incomes eroded by inflation and are dependent on state pensions.

Filed under: banking sector, bbc, blog, British Goverment, news, recession, The Guardian, bbc, Britain's local and central government finances, business, downturn, global downturn, households, news, recession, UK public sector, worries effected areas, worst global downturn since second world war

US jobless rate at 26-year high

US employers cut 216,000 jobs in August, pushing the unemployment rate up to 9.7%, a 26-year high, official figures show.

There are signs of improvement in the labour market

The unemployment rate rose after dipping to 9.4% in July but the Labor Department said the job loss figure was the smallest in a year.

Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the economy has shed 6.9 million jobs, the department said.

Jobs have been lost across manufacturing and service industries.

Total unemployment stands at 14.9 million.

Filed under: bbc, blog, news, USA, Barack Obama, bonuses, jobless rate, Unemployment, US, USA, world

Iceland to pay back Icesave cash

The Icelandic parliament has voted in favour of repaying more than $5bn (£3bn) to the governments of the UK and the Netherlands.

The governments will be reimbursed over 15 years

  

The so-called Icesave bill will reimburse funds paid by the governments to compensate those who lost money in the Icelandic online bank Icesave.

About 400,000 savers lost their money when its owner Landsbanki collapsed last year.

The bill has enraged many in Iceland, who fear it might bankrupt the nation.

The deal was agreed in June, but was only passed after an amendment was added setting various limits to the payments.

‘Fairness’

The Icesave bill’s passage means that the Icelandic government has agreed to guarantee the repayment of the £2.3bn loan the UK government made last year to ensure that none of its savers lost money.

The amendments will now have to be agreed by the UK and the Netherlands.

“It is my sincere hope after this vote, that the UK and Holland will show us understanding and fairness in this matter,” Iceland’s Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir said after the vote in parliament.

Filed under: banking sector, bbc, blog, British Goverment, Iceland, banking sector, banks, bbc, business, capitalism, consumer, downturn, economy, Goverment, Iceland, Icelandic Perliament, Icesave, pay back, UK economy, world, years

Bank of England to pump another £50bn into economy

Quantitative easing has mushroomed since March

The Bank of England is pumping another £50bn into the UK economy in a further attempt to lift it out of recession.

Britain’s central bank will raise the total amount of new money created under the quantitative easing (QE) programme to £175bn. The move is bigger than economists had expected, with the Bank admitting the recession had been “deeper than previously thought”. It also noted that the world economy is still in recession.

City economists broadly welcomed the decision, which sent the FTSE 100 index up to a new high for this year of 4729.58, but pushed sterling down against the dollar.

Stephen Boyle, head of RBS group economics, said: “We won’t know for another few quarters if the first £125bn of asset purchases by the Bank of England has managed to stop the rot, but the monetary policy committee has clearly decided that it’s better to be safe than sorry and will buy another £50bn of bonds.

“This tells us that the committee believes the UK economy remains in intensive care and that a bigger defibrillator is needed to help it emerge from the worst downturn for a generation.”

The Bank also kept interest rates at 0.5%, the lowest on record, as expected.

Alistair Darling, the chancellor, has given his approval for the Bank to extend the QE programme, which was previously capped at £150bn, with £125bn having been used so far.

Treasury minister Stephen Timms said the government and the Bank had been talking about extending the QE programme over the last few weeks. He added that “more encouraging data” in the last few days indicated that QE was starting to help the economy.

Filed under: banking sector, bbc, blog, British Goverment, Changing recession, economic depression, news, recession, £50bn, Bank of England, banking sector, banks, bbc, business, capitalism, consumer, downturn, economy, news, pump, quantitative, recesion, recession, UK economy

Fewer lenders dominate home loans

Six mortgage lenders increased their hold over the market for new UK home loans in 2008, according to Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) data.

Buyers have a far smaller choice of mortgage deals than before

 

The top six, led by the Lloyds banking group, accounted for 78% of all new loans, compared to 72% the year before.

The CML said the credit crunch, which started in 2007, had dried up the supply of mortgage finance.

Overall new lending fell by 28% last year, with some specialist lenders being driven out altogether.

“The lending community itself has undergone… dramatic changes,” the CML said.

“With so many lenders either merging or ceasing lending, this year’s largest lenders’ table has changed more than in other years,” it added.

Driven out

A key factor was Northern Rock dropping out of the top-ten mortgage lenders as a result of its insolvency in 2007, when it accounted for 8% of all new lending.

In 2008 it lent just 1.1% of new mortgage funds.

But the CML said another factor was that specialist lenders – those which did not depend on savers’ money to finance their lending – had fallen from a 7% share of new lending to just 2%, and of a much smaller market.

Filed under: banking sector, bbc, blog, blogger, British Goverment, down turn, house price fall, housing, housinghomes, news, recession, banking sector, banks, bbc, britain, business, capitalism, downturn, economy, home loans, lenders, mortage, news, recession, six mortgage, uk home, world

The Recession 2009 forum

I would like to set up a recession2009 forum – where we can all exchange thoughts and ideas.

Chat on twitter -

 http://twitter.com/recession2009

or email me at

recession.recession@googlemail.com

hope to chat to you all soon.

Filed under: Advert, blog, blogger, Internet, news, recession, twitter, business, chat, downturn, lets chat, recession, recession2009, twat, twitter, USA, world, years

Should we pull the plug – Northern Rock makes hefty losses

“is it now time to let Northern Rock go, can we all continue to support the Bank with our own money. If this was a company then it would have gone into adminstration by know. Lets pull the plug on Northern Rock and let it close down – I know at lot of people will loss money but we can’t afford to support the bank / share holders any longer”

by N Blakeley – recession 2009

 

Northern Rock has reported a loss of £724.2m for the first six months of 2009, compared with a loss of £585.4m in the first half of last year.

The nationalised bank said that 3.92% of its mortgage loans were more than three months in arrears, well above the national average of 2.39%.

It currently owes the government £10.9bn, but is waiting for European regulatory clearance for more funding.

Northern Rock was nationalised in February 2008

It had to be bailed out by taxpayers in 2007, when its model of borrowing short-term funds from wholesale markets to lend to mortgage borrowers was hit by the credit crunch.

It reported impairment losses from loans and advances of £602.2m for the first six months of the year, compared with £191.6m for the same period the year before.

Filed under: banking sector, bbc, blog, economic depression, Internet, news, Newspapers, recession, banking sector, bbc, bonuses, borrowers, business, credit crunch, global recession, Gordon Brown, loss, mortgages, news, Northern, Northern Rock, recession, Rock, share holders, wholesale, world

UK economy shrinking at fastest rate in more than 50 years

Downward revisions to official statistics show output fell 2.4% in the first three months of the year and the recession started three months earlier than thought

The recession facing Britain is even deeper than had been thought and started more than a year ago, it was revealed today.

National income fell in the first quarter of this year by 2.4%, the biggest drop since 1958, as the Office for National Statistics revised its initial estimate of 1.9%.

The figures are much worse than expected. Extended to the whole year, the drop in output in the January to March period is now equal to 4.9% – the worst since records began in 1948.

“We hope the recovery comes as soon as possible but sadly we now know this recession has been longer and deeper than we had thought,” said shadow chancellor George Osborne.

“This also means that in the future unemployment will be higher and Labour’s debt crisis will be even worse.”

Although GDP fell 2.4% in the third quarter of 1979 and first quarter of 1974, statisticians said these were rounded from 2.36% or 2.37%. The figure for this year was exactly 2.4%.

The revision is one of the biggest ever made by the ONS and it said the reasons were changes to its estimate of the construction and services sectors.

The ONS also revised down its figure for the second quarter of last year to -0.1% from zero, meaning the recession started earlier than previously thought. And the fourth quarter of 2008 figure was revised down to a fall of 1.8%.

“The recession, which now begins in the second quarter of 2008 rather than the third, is now thought to be quite a bit deeper than previously thought, and is looking ominously like the early 1980s vintage,” said Danny Gabay of Fathom Consulting.

Critics of the Bank of England who called for big interest rate cuts in the first half of last year, will feel justified by the data, since the Bank’s monetary policy committee argued into last autumn that there was little likelihood of a recession occurring and delayed rate cuts until October. In fact, the economy had entered one last spring.

Separately, the Trades Union Congress said that while there were signs of “green shoots” in the economy, this was more to do with an easing of the pace of the fall in output rather than that a big recovery was under way.

“This recession is already worse than the 1990s one and is likely to be worse than that of the 1980s,” said Richard Excel, TUC labour market expert. “It has been very severe and we are probably only half way through. It will be quite some time until employment and growth return to pre-recession levels.”

Paul Gregg, labour market expert from Bristol University, noted that unemployment had started rising earlier in this recession than in previous ones and was “encouraged” that monthly rises in the claimant count appeared to be slowing down.

sourced from The Guardian

Filed under: banking sector, bbc, blog, Changing recession, down turn, Newspapers, recession, The Guardian, bbc, business, downturn, economy, economy shrining, news, recession, The Guardian, UK economy

We are in a recession, we have a labour goverment so that all strike

Cadbury workers ‘vote on strike’

Cadbury’s produces some of the UK’s best known chocolate bars Cadbury workers begin voting on possible strike action on Saturday, according to the union Unite. Ballot papers consulting on action will begin to arrive at the homes of workers at the UK’s best-known chocolate maker, it said. Unite claims that Cadbury is breaking a long-standing pay deal with workers at its Bourneville, Chirk, Marlbrook and Somerdale plants. About 1,300 people work across the sites, the union said. The ballot will run to 18 August, it added. sourced from THE BBC Postal staff set to strike again The union has warned a national strike could take place Industrial action at the Royal Mail is set to escalate with strike action scheduled for three days next week, the BBC has learned. The strike action on 25, 27 and 28 July comes on top of Friday’s one-day walkout by 12,000 Royal Mail employees. The escalating action is in defence of workers who, the Communication Workers Union (CWU) say, are being unduly pressured by Royal Mail managers. The Royal Mail has accused the union of standing in the way of modernisation. ‘Illogical cuts’ Union members in London and other selected regions are to down tools in the dispute over job cuts and working conditions. This could result in no deliveries of mail on Saturday 25 July, and no work at Royal Mail’s London distribution centres on 27 and 28 July, says BBC business correspondent Joe Lynam. The CWU has accused Royal Mail managers of trying to “break the union for good” and accused them of “illogical and arbitrary” job cuts. Deputy General Secretary of the CWU, Dave Ward, said his union recognised that the Royal Mail is “facing huge problems” but said that it had a very different view of what modernisation is needed. The vision that Royal Mail has put to workers involves “endless job cuts, hugely damaging cuts to the service and continuous cuts in our members’ pay, pensions and conditions,” he said. Paul Tolhurst at the Royal Mail countered that with “mail volumes falling and our profits under huge pressure, there is no real opportunity for us to stop [making] the changes.” “Particularly,” he added, “as these changes we are trying to put in were agreed with [the union] in 2007.” Earlier on Friday, about 400 employees marched on Westminster to deliver letters of protest to the Business Secretary Lord Mandelson. Sell off The Royal Mail is suffering from a big drop in demand for letters as more and more people use the internet to communicate. The government announced last month that it was delaying controversial plans to sell a stake in the postal service to a private company. It maintains that the partial sell off of Royal Mail is required as part of measures to tackle the company’s finances – in particular a pensions deficit said to be near £8bn. Lord Mandelson has said the company cannot survive without the sale. The Royal Mail employs more than 150,000 people in the UK, most of whom are represented by the CWU. sourced from THE BBC

Filed under: bbc, blog, down turn, recession, Recession starts Friday 23rd January, Wild cat strikes, all about grub, allaboutgrub, britain, business, chocolate, downturn, eating, Gordon Brown, post, post office, recession, shops, Strikes, Supermarkets, supply, support, wild, wildcat strikes