The Markets The Office for National Statistics has said that UK productivity levels remain below those in 2007, with recorded figures showing a drop of 0.2% in the final quarter of 2014. While alternative measures such as output per worker were more positive, Vicky Redwood, UK Economist at Capital Economics, said that “this still isn’t…
Apologies for the lack of commentary last week, but even a Badger needs an occasional week on the slopes to recover his sense of up, down and sideways. (There was quite a lot of all of these last week.) And it feels like I’ve got back to a week of confusion, wrack and ruin in…
Every time I look at the chart below, I have mixed feelings and I am not sure which of them dominates. On one side, I am delighted with the spectacular rise in equities seen since 2009. In just six years, the market fully recovered from losses that pushed the S&P 500 back to its 1996…
Like anyone with a degree of pragmatism, I usually wait until the financial press have gathered all the data of the Budget before taking a view on what it has actually served up. Indeed, the usual situation is that unless you are a masochistic drinker or driver, it is best to avoid the whole event.…
The Markets In what may potentially be his final Budget Chancellor George Osborne delivered a generally well received set of tax changes and a raft of boosts for investors. Highlights of the speech included a further relaxation of pension rules from April next year, which will allow up to five million pensioners to swap their…
