London CNN Business — After a bruising three-week battle with bond markets, UK Prime Minister Liz Truss admitted defeat on Friday. She fired her finance minister and gutted her economic program by promising to reinstate a big tax hike on corporations. Truss said she acted in the national interest to ensure economic stability and to […]
London CNN Business — The Bank of England is struggling to contain a crisis triggered by the UK government’s brash plans to borrow heavily to pay for tax cuts, feeding fears that the country’s financial markets could once again spin out of control. Almost 20 days after Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled his much-criticized plan […]
London CNN Business — Former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig were awarded the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday for their work on banks and financial crises. The three US economists were recognized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their work in the early 1980s, which the institute […]
London CNN Business — Pension funds are designed to be dull. Their singular goal — earning enough money to make payouts to retirees — favors cool heads over brash risk takers. But as markets in the United Kingdom went haywire last week, hundreds of British pension fund managers found themselves at the center of a […]
New York CNN Business — Around the world, markets are flashing warning signs that the global economy is teetering on a cliff’s edge. The question of a recession is no longer if, but when. Over the past week, the pulse of those flashing red lights quickened as markets grappled with the reality — once speculative, […]
London CNN Business — There was good news and bad in Friday’s revised data about the UK economy. It grew — marginally — in the second quarter of the year, rather than shrinking as previously estimated. But the latest update from the Office for National Statistics also showed that the United Kingdom is the only […]
London CNN Business — A week ago, the Bank of England took a stab in the dark. It raised interest rates by a relatively modest half a percentage point to tackle inflation. It couldn’t know the scale of the storm that was about to break. Less than 24 hours later, the government of new UK […]
London CNN Business — The Bank of England said Wednesday it would buy UK government debt “on whatever scale is necessary” in an emergency intervention to halt a bond market crash that it warned could threaten financial stability. Investors have been dumping the pound and UK bonds since the government of new Prime Minister Liz […]
London CNN Business — UK policymakers are trying to calm markets after a plan by Prime Minister Liz Truss to cut taxes while ramping up borrowing sparked panic among investors worried it could feed inflation and destabilize government finances. The Bank of England said Monday that it is “monitoring developments in financial markets very closely […]
London CNN Business — The British pound slumped to a 37-year low on Friday after new data showed that shoppers are pulling back spending as inflation squeezes household budgets, underscoring fears that the economy may already be shrinking. The currency fell below $1.14, its lowest since 1985, after the Office for National Statistics said that […]