One Person View On:Bank of England Interest Rate Policy - As Consumers Struggle

One persons comment and opinion of how they feel about this policy:Extract as written 

 My savings are intended firstly to help in eventual retirement and secondly, to allow me to spend some of it now.

 The former is being made very uncertain by this pronounced and prolonged savers/debtors imbalance - in effect, negative rates eroding the pensions pot. If I had the sort of money mpc members have, then it wouldn't be a problem.

 The latter is not possible because of inflation. There's no slack to spend. I have to try to preserve what I have by keeping it in fixed term accounts to get the best rate in order not to fall too far behind inflation.

 Rates ought to keep pace with inflation. If house prices fell (it's not certain they would by much), then they will recover after the short term.  After 4 years of bountifully low rates few mortgagees should be in potential difficulty - savers shouldn't be expected to cover current debtors risks.

 Wish I was a debtor.

Ace Debt News: says that as we are getting deeper into an imbalance in our economy we are reaching a tip over point, at which time we will be unable to put our economy back on kilter! Their last comment about wishing to be a debtor is most unnerving and should be making alarm bells ring with our government! The fact is they are so involved with their own " self importance" they fail to notice the man/woman in the street!

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Credit card lending sees biggest drop in six years

Net credit card lending fell by £147 million in July, according to figures released today by the Bank of England.

Ace Debt News: Says 

This is one good thing that comes out of any crisis that people start to cut-back on spending!As the advent of a downturn in the fortunes of people and as austerity measures start to bite this will be only a good thing.

We cannot borrow ourselves out of debt! We can only manage debt with good financial advice!
        
For  more information on managing debt email me at Ace News Desk with your details and l will try to help and share your opinions at #AceDebtNews

All the posts are provided by me and any comments l provide are my own view of the markets and are not the views of the article writer and or news provider.

Osborne 'Will Fail To Stop Rise In Public Debt'

The government is "most unlikely" to meet its target to eliminate Britain's structural deficit by 2015, a think-tank has warned.

Chancellor George Osborne will also fail in his economic goal to stem the increase in public debt before the next general election, according to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS).

In a report released today, the CPS said: "The coalition came into office in 2010 with the stated aim that it would eliminate the current structural deficit within five years and stem the increase in public debt as a proportion of GDP. It is not achieving these aims.

"Though it correctly asserts that the deficit has fallen by around a quarter since 2010, the cyclically-adjusted current deficit (the part it said it wanted to eliminate within five years), had only fallen by 13.2% by the end of 2011/12."

The study found that the the majority of the reduction in the deficit has come from cuts to investment spending and tax increases rather than public spending cuts.

It said that only 6% of the Coalition's planned cuts to current expenditure had so far been implemented.

The right-leaning think-tank's report also said that official national debt is forecast to rise by £605 billion over the course of this Parliament, or from 53% of GDP in 2009/10 to 76% of GDP in 2014/15, despite the deficit falling.

"This week's growth and borrowing figures make it all the less likely that debt will be on a downward path until the next Parliament, meaning the Coalition's hard mandate will not be met on unchanged policy," the study added.

The Government's problems are exacerbated by the fact that the difference between "deficit" and "debt" is still widely misunderstood by the public, added the CPS.

A poll conducted by the think-tank as part of the report found that 47% of people believe that public debt will actually fall by around £600 billion by 2015.

Only 39% of people also correctly identified that the budget deficit has fallen since 2010.

Ryan Bourne, one of the report's authors, said: "It's becoming increasingly probable that, on current policy, neither of the Coalition's original fiscal mandates are going to met.

"With the recent dreadful borrowing figures, now would be a good time for the Coalition to restate the scale of our fiscal problems, and to set out how they will be addressed."

He added: "Only by having a clear knowledge of the problems and solutions on offer from the different parties will the electorate be able to make an informed choice in 2015."

The Treasury rejected the CPS analysis.

"The Independent Office for Budget Responsibility's (OBR) most recent assessment is that the government is broadly on track to meet its debt and deficit targets," a spokesman said.

"The OBR will update its forecasts in the autumn."

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Alistair Darling Warns Germany: Don't Go Back To The 1930s

Alistair Darling Warns Germany: Don't Go Back To The 1930s:
Alistair Darling has strongly criticised the German government's policies towards recovery in the eurozone, suggesting a failure of leadership by Angela Merkel and other European politicians risks political upheaval similar to that seen in the 1930s.

In an interview with The Huffington Post UK the former Labour chancellor expresses his fears that European politicians will continue to kick the can down the road, despite predictions that the Greek debt crisis will come to a head in September.

Building on comments at the weekend in which Darling attacked George Osborne and the coalition's economic policies, he now turns his fire on the German government, suggesting only an "extraneous shock" will spur them into taking substantive action.

"If we carry on like this, the only thing that's going to change people's minds is another severe shock," he told us. "It could be a banking crisis, a default, it could be that someone wakes up one morning and decides to have a real go at one of the larger economies in Europe. And people will find the fund they have works for small countries, but if Spain had problems it would hoover it up in a few hours.

Darling dismisses predictions that next month will see a denouement to the eurozone crisis, despite speculation that the ongoing uncertainty surrounding Greece's future in the single currency will come to a head in September.

Next month is likely to see both Greece and Spain having to go cap in hand to Europe for bailouts, and while concerns about the eurozone have been subdued over the summer the next few months are expected to see further negotiations as Greece struggles to meet the austerity requirements of its rescue package from the European Central Bank. The eurozone psychodrama is likely to resurface by the end of this week, as talks on Greece's austerity timetable are expected to resume.

Darling believes the current debt management plan for Greece is untenable.

"You've got to have a settlement than is credible," he says. "One that leaves the Greeks with more debt in 2020 than they started with is not credible. Their prime minister [Antonis Samaras] is not a firebrand, he won the election saying there was no alternative.

"And it's not just him," Darling goes on. "Spain, again a right of centre government, one that is following almost to the letter Mrs Merkel's prescription, is saying this is not working. [Italian prime minister] Mario Monti, who is more mainstream if you like, could only persuade Italians to take the pain if there is some gain.

"What you see in Europe at the moment is policies being pursued that are manifestly not working," Darling concludes, "And this is like the 1930's, they carried on pursuing policies which weren't working. How much is it going to take to make them change their minds?

"Does Germany remember the history of the 1930s, when people claimed it was high inflation that brought in fascism? It wasn't. It was the depresssion that brought in the despair into the then-Weimar Republic that allowed people who were absolutely vile to take over," Darling told HuffPost on Thursday.

"If you take the economic lessons of the 1930s, the prescription that is being advocated now is not disimmilar to the prescriptions that were being advocated by the British and US treasuries in the early 1930s, and it didn't work."

"It took a new deal and ultimately re-armament. I think people have forgotten it."

In a broadside against the coalition, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank, Darling suggested leaders were creating the impression that they've given up, and that this was politically dangerous.

"I am more despairing now than I've been since this crisis started," he says. "If you go back to 2008, people are now openly saying we were right. I recently saw one of the present government's chief backers who said that to me, as if he'd never said anything different.

"Our influence is much reduced, and we need to co-operate with the eurozone," Darling insists. "Politicians will get it wrong from time to time, but at the moment everybody looks like they've given up trying, and that creates disillusionment, and that's what you've got to worry about. People feel that no-one's showing the lead, they become open to ideas that most people would normally want to give a wide berth to."

Asked whether he thought European geopolitics are still more malleable than people commonly assumed, he replied: "It is. People forget 2008, never mind the 1930s, or the 1920's. It really is very depressing.

"I think the best we can hope for is a continued muddling through for a few more crises, but there will come a time when something will happen, and my guess is it will happen in a way they weren't expecting, and they'll be caught with their trousers down.

"The one thing they are agreed on is that they're not going to agree. It will take some extraneous shock to the system that will achieve that."

In terms of Labour's response to the economic crisis, Darling stuggests that Ed Balls needs to "put down markers" at the Labour Party conference. "Both Eds will be aware of it," he told us.

"You can spend your first year looking back, your second year taking stock, but in the third year Ed Balls will want to develop that, and I think he will."

But Darling counsels the current generation of frontline politicians to stay their hand in terms of bashing the banking industry.

"What we have to do is find that fine line between putting things right without trashing something, because there are people in other parts of the world who'd dearly love to get their hands on it," he says.

Darling referred to the attacks on Standard Chartered by regulators in New York state earlier this month, which the former chancellor described as "political", in line with other Labour politicians.

"Bashing banks can be superficially good politics, and bashing other people's banks cleary is very attractive. It looked like a classic American pose, to accuse the bank of all sorts of things, and get them to settle.

"If I was an American politican or regulator, I'd say be careful. One thing that's terribly important in fiancial services is certainty. You don't want a degree of arbitrariness about how it goes.

"It's a difficulty place to occupy, but I think because I'm no longer in frontline politics I can better occupy it than if I was," he concludes.

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Former Tory Treasurer: Give Back 'Tainted' Asil Nadir Money

Former Tory Treasurer: Give Back 'Tainted' Asil Nadir Money:
The man who was Tory treasurer when the party received hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations from Asil Nadir's Polly Peck business empire has called on David Cameron to hand back the "tainted" money.

Lord McAlpine said the Prime Minister was under a "moral duty" to return the political gift after the former fugitive tycoon was jailed for 10 years yesterday.

The sentencing of Nadir, who donated £440,000 to the Tories during the 1980s, came a day after he was convicted of stealing £28.8 million from the global business he built from an east London textile company.

Urging the governing party to return the money, Lord McAlpine told The Daily Mail: "It is tainted money and it shames the Conservatives if they hang on to it. They have a moral duty to give it back."

He said the money should be paid to Nadir's creditors, some of whom lost their life savings when Polly Peck International (PPI) crashed leaving debts of £550 million.

Nadir, who was once 36th on the Sunday Times Rich List, was found guilty of 10 counts of theft from the Stock Exchange high performer between 1987 and 1990.

The 71-year-old fled Britain for his native Northern Cyprus in May 1993 but returned voluntarily in August 2010 to face trial.

The amount he stole is the equivalent of £61.6 million today. The prosecution had alleged it was part of £150 million taken from the company.

Old Bailey judge Mr Justice Holroyde said Nadir stole the money out of "pure greed" and that his behaviour had contributed to PPI crashing. Investors who lost money included large institutions, small investors and pension funds.

Lord McAlpine, who was Tory Treasurer from 1975 when Margaret Thatcher became leader until her fall in 1990, added: "The moment he (Nadir) fled the country in 1993, to avoid criminal charges, it was obvious to me he was a complete conman.

"Frankly the Tories should have given the money back in 1993. But today the case is even clearer.

"There is a moral imperative for the money to be returned. The money was not Asil Nadir's to give although we thought it was at the time. Therefore the Tory Party has a duty to return it."

The peer added that he was certain that Lady Thatcher would have ordered the party to return the money immediately if she was still leader.

The Conservatives have insisted the donations were made by Polly Peck, rather than by Nadir, and had seen no evidence the money was stolen.

However, Labour backbencher Simon Danczuk pointed to press reports from the 1990s which stated that a report by accountants Touche Ross in 1993 warned the Tory Party that £365,000 of the £440,000 it received in donations came from money defrauded from Polly Peck.

In a letter to Tory co-chairman Baroness Warsi, Mr Danczuk said: "The Touche Ross report raised serious issues about the donations received.

"The conviction of Asil Nadir on charges of theft has brought this issue back into the public eye but it also presents the Conservative Party with an opportunity to finally put this matter to bed."

A Conservative Party spokesman said they were not aware of the Touche Ross report and questioned whether it ever existed.

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Even Adam Smith Would be Appalled by Romney's Tax Evasions

Even Adam Smith Would be Appalled by Romney's Tax Evasions:

Mitt Romney says “every year I’ve paid at least 13 percent [of my income in taxes] and if you add in addition the amount that goes to charity, why the number gets well above 20 percent.”
This is supposed to be in defense of not releasing his tax returns.

Assume, for the sake of the argument, he’s telling the truth. Since when are charitable contributions added to income taxes when judging whether someone has paid his fair share?

More to the point, Romney admits to an income of over $20 million a year for the last several decades. Which makes his 13 percent — or even 20 percent — violate the principle of equal sacrifice that lies at the core of our notion of tax fairness.

Even Adam Smith, the 18th century guru of free-market conservatives, saw the wisdom of a graduated tax embodying the principle of equal sacrifice. “The rich should contribute to the public expense,” he wrote, “not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more in proportion.”

Equal sacrifice means that in paying taxes people ought to feel about the same degree of pain regardless of whether they’re wealthy or poor. Logically, this means someone earning $20 million a year should pay a much larger proportion of his income in taxes than someone earning $200,000, who in turn should pay a larger proportion than someone earning $50,000.

But Romney’s alleged 13 percent tax rate is lower than that of most middle class Americans who earn a tiny fraction of what he earns.

At a time when poverty is increasing, when public parks and public libraries are being closed and when public schools are shrinking their offerings and their hours, when the nation’s debt is immense, and when the 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together — Romney’s 13 percent is shameful.

Sun, 08/19/2012 - 05:18
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BofA: 'CODE RED..RISK OF SELL-OFF IS HIGH' (SPY)

BofA: 'CODE RED..RISK OF SELL-OFF IS HIGH' (SPY):

Yesterday, BofA's top North America economist Ethan Harris penned a bearish note on the the U.S. economy, writing that it "is in the eye of the storm" and that a number of troubling headwinds loom on the horizon.
BofA strategists Arjun Mehra and Cheryl Rowan have a warning more precisely aimed at the stock market. In a note to clients entitled Code Red, Mehra and Rowan claim there is "limited upside from here" and the "risk of a sell-off is high."
The strategists point out that stocks have managed to rally even in spite of one of the worst earnings seasons in years and growth slowing in the U.S. and around the world. They think the explanation is the "Bernanke Put;" in other words, investors are expecting more monetary easing in the form of QE3.
But in spite of the dovish language from the Fed this past week, Mehra and Rowan are concerned that the central bank may disappoint.
From the note:

Risk of a sell-off is high

Economist Michael Hanson points out an interesting circular relationship between the stock market and Fed policy. There are some who believe the Fed will not launch QE3 so long as stock prices remain high, yet the stock market is high because it anticipates QE3. Should the Fed disappoint at the September 12-13 FOMC meeting, the risk of a stock sell-off is high. S&P 500 support on a correction is in the 1360-1325 area. Additional support is at 1300-1250. Attention will be on the Jackson Hole symposium next week to get a feel for the Fed’s tone.

Macro catalysts increase the risk of a correction

Our strategists see an unusually high number of macro catalysts over the next 3-6 months that could take markets lower. We expect economic growth to disappoint in the second half of the year in anticipation of the fiscal cliff. This would exacerbate any slowdown from the deepening recession in Europe and decelerating growth in emerging markets. There is also the ongoing tension in the Middle East, the potential for a US credit downgrade and accelerating downward analyst estimate revisions. To top it off, September is seasonally the weakest month of the year for stock price returns.

The BofA strategists conclude that with the VIX at record low levels, those looking to hedge against a correction should buy put options on stocks while they are cheap, echoing a message several Wall Street analysts have relayed on television and in client notes over the past week.

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