The title of what Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced yesterday, ‘Job Support Scheme’, flatters to deceive. The key thing to be aware of is that employers are being asked to pay one-third of the topping up of a worker’s wage who has been moved from full-time to part-time hours, which many of them are not going […]
UK Economy
Are you a ‘Kurzarbeit’ or a ‘chômage partiel’ person? UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak will make an important statement to the House of Commons this afternoon about what will replace the furlough scheme at the end of October, with debate rife about whether German or French models will be preferred, or something completely different altogether. The Kurzarbeit […]
Beyond furlough
The official economic data for the first half of 2020 is out, and according to the ONS there is only one country in Europe that Britain has not had a deeper recession than in the first half of the year. Spain. Apart from Belgium, the two countries which have the worst deaths per million from […]
No time for fiddling while Rome burns
“One projection we can make about the psychological state of the population, is that a return to lockdown in conditions of a second wave of infections would deal a sharp blow to consumer spending and business investment.”
Analysis: The fading hope of the ‘roaring twenties’ poses problems for our rulers
The hedge-fund Chancellor knows how to grab the front-pages. £10 per head for a meal out, but only in August, and only on Monday-Wednesday, is novel. The Rishi-burger is indicative of the kind of gimmicky, short-term, consumption-heavy and corporate-subsidy laden approach of the Chancellor’s announcement. As The Guardian’s economics commentator Aditya Chakrabortty pointed out, it’s […]
Who wants a Rishi-burger?
Do you know about the Covid Corporate Financing Facility? Well, don’t beat yourself up if the answer’s ‘no’, very few do. You’ll find it scarcely reported in today’s papers. In fact, the Bank of England at first wanted no one to know about it – they sought to give out public money to corporations in […]
The corporate bailout you’ve never heard of
It is supremely embarrassing to Boris Johnson to find that, on the crucial matter of governance of the day, he is suddenly prime minister not of the UK but of England.
The end of lockstep lockdown: can it lead to a wider divergence?
“As tourism has been one of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic, so it will likely be one of the sectors most difficult to reopen.”
On Your Marks, Jet Set…
“The economy is not some mechanistic computer that can simply be turned off and on again so we should be prepared for a substantial amount of rebuilding as we come out of the crisis.”
Turn it off and on again
A flurry of forecasts of economic doom arrived yesterday, though there’s good reason to think they were over-optimistic in their doom-mongering. The IMF have predicted a 3 per cent slump for the year globally, presuming the world can get out of lockdown by summer without a second spike. In the UK, the Office for Budget […]