Economics

By Render Positive London was never a particularly cheap place to live – in fact, Rightmove’s figures suggest that the average asking price of a property in London has risen by £80,000 since the start of 2014. As a result, prices are now at an all-time high, and only look set to rise in future. However, as is to be expected, some boroughs are significantly more expensive than others, with some enjoying a meteoric rise in prices following different developments,...

By Marcus Hunt Peer-to-peer lending is a highly innovative means of businesses acquiring capital; crowdsourcing loans from dozens of small investors is a way for both parties to secure better interest rates by cutting out the cumbersome middle-men at the banks. From humble beginnings, sites like Zopa, Ratesetter and Funding Circle have now facilitated loans of over £1 billion to small and medium-sized British businesses. However, I think that there is good reason to believe that over the medium-term the...

  By Valentina Magri “Money doesn’t make you happy” is the typical saying that you state when you want to raise the spirit of people dissatisfied with their personal finances. But if you live in the UK, you should forget it, cash is king. Money and happiness Basically, there are two main views over the link between money and happiness. According to Easterlin, happiness comes from money until a saturation point (Easterlin paradox). Once you overcome this boundary, the correlation...

By Rachel Wilson Political Reporter The current cuts to the public sector look set to impact on women the hardest. Women make up the majority of public sector workers and cuts to the sector has pushed women’s unemployment up over the past few years. Women make up 65% of the public sector workforce in the UK and the latest figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility estimate that 929,000 jobs will be lost in the public sector by 2018. Over...

By Valentina Magri The decision of the European Council to propose Jean-Claude Juncker as the next President of the European Commission was “one step closer to quitting Europe” for Britain. The move made David Cameron feel very angry. Indeed, the PM has promised a referendum in 2017 over EU membership if the Conservative party win the 2015 general election. Opinion polls show that Brits are split on the issue. But what would be the economic consequences of Brexit? The five economic consequences...

By Simon Bartram Setting interest rates is no easy task. It would be wishful thinking to imagine that every economic effect of every economic action can be perfectly predicted. We're dealing with a multitude of different people with different circumstances, personalities and ambitions – evidently not a subject matter that can be easily tested under a microscope and certainly not a topic about which claims can be made with a scientist's precision. Not to mention that we're dealing with a...

By Phillip Oppenheim Cuba – sexy, sultry, sandy, salsa – and the last frontier of emerging markets? If you don’t count North Korea, that is. Maybe not everyone’s choice of place to do business, but you might be surprised. Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, the Cubans tried to keep the flame of socialism burning, only to find themselves almost starving without the help of the massive Soviet subsidies they had enjoyed. Plan B from 1995 was...

By Valentina Magri Lowered rates were expected, but Mario Draghi made them real. On 5th June 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) set a 0.15 per cent intervention rate and a minus 0.1 per cent rate on banks’ deposits. But this time, the ECB has taken also unconventional measures to address deflation and credit crunch. One of them, labelled as TLTRO, is “copied from the Bank of England’s Funding for Lending Scheme”, as Martin Wolf wrote on the “Financial Times”....

By Guy Dorrell @GuyDorrellEsq Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, interviewed on Sky News’ Murnaghan programme spoke about the risks to UK economic recovery in particular "those risks that centre in the housing market”. He was referring to the potential for overheating of a market with plenty of demand – much of it fuelled by foreign investment – but with a supply side providing half the stock of new builds compared with his native Canada. Average asking...