Mark carney

Car sales are up 11pc, making the FT splash this morning. House prices are soaring again, up 8pc last year. And the British Chamber of Commerce has this morning released its Q4 survey showing a startling surge in investment, orders and employment (graph, above). Good news for George Osborne’s plan for a ‘balanced’ recovery: manufacturers’ capacity use, confidence and employment difficulties are at the highest since the survey began in 1988. The upshot, as Citi says (pdf) is that the UK economy will likely grow far faster this year than Osborne’s cautious official expectation. He will most likely have another healthy upgrade to announce in his next budget. Citi expects

Mark Carney’s speech to the Economics Club of New York yesterday made clear that very low interest rates now ‘put a premium on macroprudential policies’. Translation: he’s not going to hike interest rates soon, but he wants us to know that there are other levers he can pull to keep the UK economy on track. What are those levers? First, Funding for Lending. Two weeks ago Mark Carney announced that the scheme – which offers banks cheap funding if they increase lending to the real economy – would no longer be available for mortgage lending. It will only be open for loans to companies. That’s a lot more than just

Yet another survey suggests that Britain is booming – this time, it’s from the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. They’re the guys who kept interest rates too low for too long – creating the last boom. It sees another boom now.”For the first time in a long time you don’t have to be an optimist to see the glass is half full,” said Mark Carney, the new BoE Governor. “The recovery has finally taken hold.” Citi has crunched latest BoE figures (pdf) and says this envisages real GDP growth of a stonking 3.4 per cent next year and 2.8 per cent the year after, which it says is one

Mark Carney’s charm offensive continues. I hear that the new governor of the Bank of England was laying it on thick last week when he bumped into Faisal Islam, Channel Four’s Economics Editor, after he gave his first public speech. ‘Don’t you have a book out?’ The Canadian smoothy asked Faisal, who offered to send him a copy. ‘Well I’ve got an idea, how about I buy one?’ The charmer cooed. ‘I’d be honoured, governor.’ Faisal beamed. ‘Hey,’ replied the governor, ‘I said I’d buy it; I didn’t say I’d read it!’ Faisal tells me that Carney ‘might have turned down Osborne’s advances if he’d read the full gory detail

Is this the end of business attire? The slow degradation of the standard issue suit has reached the Institute of Directors — the Pall Mall-based bastion of all things business. Its website says that members should ‘make the decision on what they would normally wear to do business, as long as it is not deemed indecent.’ So, what does that mean? ‘Members will be permitted to wear jeans, T-shirts, shorts and all variants of footwear. There is a very mixed view about the dress code and this will be for a trial period of 3 months.’ The trial is advanced: my mole says that there have been at least seven

Mark Carney made his mark this morning. Moments ago, he opened his inflation report and issued his ‘forward guidance’, which is designed to make the markets aware of his long-term plans for interest rates. This is important because, although there are signs of life in the British economy (and Carney was cautious about them), inflation remains above the Bank of England’s target, the base interest rate remains rooted to the floor and unemployment remains high at around 8 per cent. There is also the question of Britain’s mounting debts, the answer to which will largely depend on how the bond markets react to this and other announcements. And then there is

I’ve been in the pulpit again, this time to salute the centenary of the death of Charles Norris Gray, a formidable Victorian vicar of my Yorkshire town of Helmsley. Gray was a social activist with strong opinions on everything from sanitation to election candidates, and he did a great deal of good for his parish — so I’m not averse to the idea of churchmen intervening in worldly affairs, and I think Archbishop Justin Welby was right to highlight the parasitical nature of ‘payday lenders’ such as Wonga, even if he was subsequently embarrassed to discover that the Church of England was an indirect investor in it. But by his

Has the British establishment been taken over by men from the Commonwealth? What with a Canadian in charge of the Bank of England, an Aussie strategy advisor for the Tories, a South African advising the Lib Dems, and — let’s not forget — a Zimbabwean coaching our cricket team, it does seem as if alpha males from the former empire are in charge. In this week’s podcast, James Forsyth discusses his cover essay on ‘The New Colonials’, and explains what makes them so successful. He’s joined by Ruth Porter from the Institute of Economic Affairs, a New Zealand citizen who is also married to a Kiwi, as they attempt to

Marc Rich, the godfather of global commodity trading who died last week, ‘deserves credit as one of the greatest creators and sharers of wealth in business history’, wrote James Breiding in the Financial Times in a counterblast to obituarists who had painted the secretive Swiss-based billionaire and former fugitive from US justice as ‘a flamboyant, tax-evading crook’. Bill Clinton certainly saw the better angel in Rich’s nature, granting a presidential pardon for his embargo-busting dealings with Iran against all precedent and advice. But leaving aside the unpatriotic oil trades and the unpaid taxes (not to mention the former Mrs Rich’s timely donation to the Clinton Library), is Breiding right to

What the Mark Carney era may offer is a little bit more predictability on monetary policy. Under Mervyn King the main guidance came from the Bank’s quarterly Inflation Report press conferences, MPC minutes, and speeches by committee members. Under the Bank’s new remit, set by the Chancellor in the March budget, it’s likely that Carney, like Bernanke, will seek to link interest rates and monetary policy directly to growth and jobs targets There will be subtle changes but no one, as economists at HSBC have noted, is expecting ‘shock and awe’. The big question for Carney is which indicators to use as targets. The runners are unemployment (as in the US), real

If free and open markets are the Wild West, inhabited by roving bands of asset managers, hedge funds, investment bankers and random traders, then the sheriffs are the central bankers. A change of sheriff makes a real difference to trading conditions. The focus of London traders and analysts has already shifted to a new sheriff with the arrival of Mark Carney at the Bank of England next week, and much anticipation of his new tool of ‘forward guidance’, which he is expected to unveil in August. Central bankers, far more than politicians, have long held sway over financial markets. That influence is at its greatest at times of economic tumult.