advfn.com Do they make it easier for the government? It is bad form for the stock market to crash over summer; October is the traditional month for that. Not this year (though who knows what October will bring anyway). Since the beginning of July, the London market has lost about a sixth of its value, most in the last month. The hundreds of billions of pounds that represents is a very real figure but not an immediate one: it doesn’t…
Is it the wrong time to assert unearned rights? In the emergency parliamentary debate on the riots this week both David Cameron and Ed Miliband used the disturbances as evidence in support of concepts that are clearly key to how they see their leaderships and what they want to address or to deliver through them: the Broken Society in David Cameron’s case, and the British Promise in Ed Miliband’s. The Labour leader’s is the more interesting of the two at…
How much will electorates take from their representatives? It’s easy to think of democracy as the natural political system for the majority of the world. It’s widely aspired to in those countries that don’t have it and even dictatorships usually feel the need to legitimise their rule through some form of elections, no matter how fraudulent they may be in reality. History tells us however that the route to democracy is not a one-way street. Of the 27 current members…
Gallup Should he really be such a tight odds-on favourite? One statistic about US politics that has been bandied about quite a lot recently is that no US president since Franklin Roosevelt has been re-elected with the unemployment rate above 7.2%. The figure for this month is 9.2%. It will take some turnaround for the rate to get back down by November next year, particularly in light of the sluggish growth figures released there this week. As they say in…
Guardian Will Obama and Congress go to the brink and beyond? Possibly the biggest political gamble going on at the moment is the series of judgement calls being made by politicians in Washington. By their failure to agree so far, they are running the very real risk of at the least a partial shutdown of the federal government and at worst an outright default. None of it need happen. The markets are willing to lend the money the government needs…
How did so many lose the plot over the last decade? Banking, politics and journalism have in the last three years been engulfed in their own crises. Is this just a coincidence? In some ways yes – the problems in finance were international in scope whereas those in politics and the media were domestic – but there are still striking similarities in behaviour and timing. Ed Miliband spoke about it in quite a good speech earlier this week, which touched…
BBC news How serious is the debt crisis going to get? It is a measure of how preoccupied the media has been with the phone-hacking scandal and the associated stories of the aborted NewsCorp takeover of BSkyB that prior to Thursday, one or other aspect of it formed the subject of Robert Peston’s previous sixteen blog entries. It is without doubt a major and developing story and fascinating to the Westminster Village as it involves so many of them. But…
Where do the developments so far leave the key players? The phone-hacking scandal has produced a bad week for many people. Some have been arrested, some tainted by association, some have lost their job, some have had their judgement questioned. A newspaper of 168 years standing has been closed. Others no doubt wait nervously. It’s big and dramatic news – perhaps too much so. Retaining a sense of proportion at times like this is crucial and difficult, not least because…