Economy

Multiplying by hundreds The Queen penned a personal 100th birthday message to Captain Tom Moore, who has raised money for NHS charities by walking around his Bedfordshire garden. — The tradition of the monarch sending 100th birthday greetings began with George V in 1917, when he sent out a telegram with the words: ‘His Majesty’s hope that the blessings of good health and prosperity may attend you during the remainder of your days.’ That year he sent out 24 such cards. — By the time Elizabeth II became Queen in 1952 the number had grown to 273. — In 2014 the office which sends out cards on her behalf had

Will the recovery be shaped like a V or a U, some other letter or perhaps the Nike swoosh? This is a much-discussed question among economists right now — but it is not the most important question. We’re familiar with the idea of an up-and-down financial crisis where things return to their starting point: we had roller-coasters in the mid-1980s. Even after the global financial crash of 2008-09, financiers still kept their place as masters of the universe. Global supply chains were repaired and the old power structures remained in position. This time might be very different. Old fixes are being applied to a new crisis. Central banks, for example,

The phrase ‘sharing economy’ was coined a decade or so ago to describe collaborative new business models made possible by the internet, from Airbnb and Uber to crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending and skill bartering sites. It was about ways of monetising assets, circulating capital and earning casual livings that boosted economic activity after the ‘great recession’ and it will be a hive of creativity in the next recovery — even though its partner is the ‘gig economy’ whose insecurity has left so many people in hardship now. But I want to propose a more urgent purpose for the same phrase: to describe how every business should share the impact of the

Comically, Chinese Communist party officials have speculated that Covid-19 was planted by the US army. Yet a respectable conspiracy theorist would deduce that a virus sending the rest of the world into an hysterical, wholesale economic shutdown has ‘Made in China’ written all over it. After all, China didn’t flat-line its entire economy to contain the contagion. At the end of this debacle, then, China could rule the world — although it won’t have many solvent customers left to buy its products. The only other countries calling the shots in future could be South Korea, Japan and Sweden, having thus far resisted the stampede to lockdown. In my 1994 novel

It’s hard to think of a place more deserving of a post-Brexit boom than Grimsby. In the 1950s it had the largest trawler fleet in the world, brought in hundreds of tonnes of cod a day, and you could cross its harbour by walking over ships in the dock. But the Cod Wars were lost and the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy began to bite. Now Grimsby is one of the most deprived areas in the country, and its long road down to the docks is littered with shuttered shops. Simply put, it’s exactly the kind of place the Tories are hoping to ‘level up’ and win over before the next

Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline. Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching

Close your eyes, and you could have been listening to Gordon Brown in his pomp. Seven billion for schools. Six billion for the NHS. Money for youth centres, the police, and social care with overall spending rising at the fastest rate for fifteen years. If Chancellors were measured simply by their ability to spend more of other people’s money than any of their rivals – and in truth plenty of them see that as their main goal – then Sajid Javid would have already got off to a great start. But will it be enough to win the looming election? Sure, it will help – but he will need to

Ed Conway, Sky News’s economics editor, tweets this morning that sterling has notched up a dubious record – it stands out as the worst-performer of all major currencies over the past 24 hours, month, three months and 12 months. But does that matter? Yes, if you are about to go on a foreign holiday. Take a longer view, however, and you might conclude that a weak pound might be rather a good thing. The most obvious point about a sinking currency is that it makes the country’s exports cheaper in global markets and makes imports more expensive. It thus helps to boost production while simultaneously helping to switch consumers towards

How can a new incumbent of No. 10 survive without a majority and with Brexit to solve? It defies the imagination. Yet if they do survive Brexit, against all odds, there could be an even bigger horror waiting around the corner: global recession. For three years the economy has defied doom-laden predictions by aggrieved remainers. Suddenly, though, the economic news is looking ominous. In May, retail sales fell by 2.7 per cent compared with a year earlier. The manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI), an indicator which runs a month ahead of Office for National Statistics data, plunged from 53.1 in April to 49.4 in May, where any figure below 50 denotes