How serious is the global financial crisis?

Privatise the profits and nationalise the losses. So a year on from the crash and things are beginning to turn, the bankers not prepared to be skint for very much longer so taking risks again as the stock market rockets back to a 12 month high, 23% up on October 2008. The FTSE breezed through 5000 last month and the DOW moved through 10,000 yesterday for the first time in 18 months. The market could only ever go up after the panic selling and so cheap blue chip stocks a plenty accounting for that return. A significant chunk of government cash that HAD to be spent on banks to bail them out will go on those big bonuses though. This upturn, of course, doesn't ...  Read the complete review

We didn't see it coming. We couldn't have known. It's a global problem that needs global solutions. An assortment of the bull***t blame-shifting we're having force-fed to us via the media lately. The truth is, even the most casual of armchair economists *could* see this coming. We *should* have known. The clever spivs at the keyboards hammered away. The CEO's paid the clever spivs and themselves enormous sums of money to create paper wealth. The shareholders lapped up the dividends. The government and the regulators sanctioned their actions and basked in the glory of a 'world leading' financial services industry. This we all know; a ...  Read the complete review

DooYoo Review: Dated - 06-11-08 TITLED: Uptown Whirl - Banking that make you... hurl - now we've got a down-turn... o' boy -Banking crisis - No I'm no Billy Joel and have tried to put a jolly face on after all this financial misery that has descended on us all. I'm now beginning to hear exhausted Robert Preston mono-toned reports in my sleep. I'm sure his voiced has dropped several octaves and slowed up quite considerably over the past few weeks; so now I've promised myself to think of Christine Brinkley (The original Uptown Girl; not the one doing Strictly Come Prancing at the moment) before I nod off in front of News-night. It is ...  Read the complete review

A thought-provoking - and rather alarming - graph was published in The Economist not long ago. It charted the ratio of average debt to average income year by year over the past century. It showed a twin-peak pattern. Relative to income, debt rose to a high point in the 1920s, fell sharply in the 1930s and then stayed low until the mid-1990s, since when it has risen inexorably. It is now at its highest point for over a hundred years, higher even than in 1929. We really have been borrowing an awful lot of money. One can explain the world's current financial crisis in many ways (rash mortgage lending to sub-prime prospects unable to keep up repayments, the ...  Read the complete review