Sunday 6 January 2008

2008 inaugral sunday round-up


The new year sees the return of the business round-up this week. Last year was a very significant year in terms of business and economics; this year will be even more so.
Before you get to the click-fest below, let me know if there are any changes or additions you would like to see to this format....more international news? more focus on specific areas? etc..

Here are the 10 stories to get us started, many will be with us for a few weeks to come:

Housing crash threatens Rock sale - The fall in house prices is giving the jitters tot he banks who are proposing to lend to the potential Northern Rock saviours. Alternatives to state ownership are now nearly all gone..

Goldman to the rescue of the Rock - However, perhaps the above can be trumped by a new financing initiative from Goldman Sachs. We will know the answer before long.

Cohen rounds on AIM - Veteran investor sides with the yanks and asks some difficult questions of the LSE's AIM market. Hard to answer these, especially as the overall shares on this market go south. This year could be a tough one for AIM investors.

M&S leads the denouement - Retailers to continue the 'bad' news (bad for them, good for those managing personal debts in a more sensible way) from the last quarter.

Bank urged to cut rates
- The Bank of England is under great pressure to cut rates again. Few chances now to avoid stagflation.

Comment of the week - Liam Halligan in the Telegraph on the meddling of politicians.

Nuclear power funding - This will be a story for the next 20 years. The sums involved and the risks are astronomical.

Gold heading to new highs - Volatility drives up the price even further. Gold is doing even better than Google!

Challenges for TV in 2008 - Good summary of some of the regulatory and economic changes coming to the media in 2008.

Guardian share tips - just for a laugh...

15 comments:

Old BE said...

I would like to read some unrealistically good-news stories to balance things off. They don't have to be true, just positive enough to make us think that it's all gonna be AOK. Perhaps a link to the No. 10 website...

Re Northern Rock, if private institutions aren't going to buy it why should we?

Anonymous said...

One of the probs for nukes is that many of the assumed risks are not estimated by physical measurements or calculations, but are arbitrarily decreed by governments. There's no reason to suppose that governments won't retrospectively change them. It's therefore very hard to see how to conduct a rational investment appraisal.

Nick Drew said...

dearieme, that is exactly right, and all too easy to see why it appeals to a socialist

also why it appeals to the 'nuclear industry' (such as it is in the UK) - but I fail to see why it appeals to 'rational capitalists'

Newmania said...

I have been reading about the end of Oil this year whuich clearkly must come .
Persoanlly I see no reasion why we should not enter a new dark age without nuclear power. Might as well start getting it right

hatfield girl said...

We've got nuclear power though, N, it doesn't go away you know, (to borrow a chilling phrase) just because it doesn't work anymore; it's still working only not producing 'clean' energy -so bad that France insists we all pay to make it stop, ostensibly throughout Europe but really just in France.

Nick Drew said...

Mr M, oil is of course finite, but not in any meaningful sense in our lifetimes, there is a vast quantity still to be had, decades and decades worth at even $40/bbl, still more at (say) $80

it's all a question of access because increasingly it's in 'non-Western' hands

I have nothing ideological against nuc, only against socialist central planning: let it prove itself economically

CityUnslicker said...

Good news stories Ed - did you not read the Guardian share tips...

Old BE said...

I started reading then I saw AIM...

Anonymous said...

Northern Rock: its pretty clear that the financial institutions haven't got any money to pay for anything, least of all Northern Crock. They can't even create some debt to buy it because their likely debt to reserve ratios are likely to deteriorate markedly during 2008. That's what a credit crunch is -and NR is just the first victim. Plenty more on the way. Including me... Just hope the company pays me some redundancy and doesn't just go bust.

M&S: Ah yes. Take control of your finances and pay down your debt. Then get made unemployed by the retailer that pays your salary due to the sudden reduction in consumer spending. But there's always the IVA route. Make the fools that never get into debt pay for those that do. That's socialism.

Nukes: 10 more nukes. Will those replace the nukes that are due to be decomissioned? Presumably so. Can't be arsed to check. No doubt the government will be telling us about the difficult decisions it took to save the planet from MMGW by building more nukes - when really it just replaced the ones we had to save on cleaning the sites up, and with no net reduction in CO2. Its all so depressingly inevitable. But its really OK because MMGW was another socialist lie.

Isn't the weather dreadful today? Perhaps we could build millions of wind turbines from parts made almost for free in China and export energy for a change. Might help our trade deficit. We could call it an "industrial policy". Been a long time since we had one of those. Whatever happened to the DTI? Oh, I remember - they cut its funding to give the cash to teaching assistants.

How about a poll CU? I'm thinking that things are going to be as bad as the 70s and I am likely to be needing another job this year. But I might just set up my own company. But there isn't much point in doing that if things are going to collapse completely and we end up eating our neighbours as the only source of food. So what does everyone think the chances of total economic collapse in the UK might be? Don't say "it couldn't happen here". Back in the 70s we had just a small recession and it led to continuous wildcat strikes and the "winter of discontent". A really big one could definitely lead to civil war.

Richard Havers said...

Interesting piece about TV, but little mention of the BBC. The appalling performance of ITV is masking the decline in the BBC's output. And it's not just TV, because radio is in as big a mess. The BBC board is paying itself vast salaries, is paying some top presenters obscene amounts of money and thinking it can save itself to prosperity by cutting staff numbers. we are in danger of losing one of Britain's greatest national treasures thanks to a bunch of wide boys.

Mark Wadsworth said...

Sod nukes, let's go back to coal, which we have on- and off-shore in abundance. The MMGW myth is rapidly unravelling, so that's the last argument for nukes out of the window.

Old BE said...

RS: yes it could easily happen here. What marks Labour chancellors out from their Tory counterparts is the ability to make a mountain out of a molehill. A small downturn and a small increase in inflation will be exaggerated until we are in hyperinflation mode.

When the Asian and Russian crises hit I remember Chancellor Brown came out very quickly with a promise that no downturn would affect his spending plans. In 1998 he had the advantage of a nice cash pile to sit on which we don't have anymore.

I anticipate a race to the bottom in exposed sectors with people competing with each other to take the biggest pay cut to avoid redundancy.

Nick Drew said...

RS - yes the existing nucs are to be decommissioned in an established programme: BE will (quite reasonably) seek to squeeze out the last drop, but only Sizewell B has a life beyond 2020.

The problem, as we've noted here before, is that the others belonging to BE are all of the same quirky design (AGRs) and there is the possibility that something ghastly transpires which may force them all out of service at short notice: see
http://cityunslicker.blogspot.com/2007/11/british-energy-half-year-report-fallout.html
and some excellent comments to that post.

As discussed here and on Ed's and Mark's blogs, we just don't know what nucs really cost, thus making it a decision (for that is what it seems to be) at best based primarily on blind faith.

I begin to wonder whether it is in fact a Keynsian scheme by Brown to spend his way out of imminent recession. They will certainly cost a bunch ...

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