Daylight Savings Time

Via Ben Brogan I see that there's yet another attempt to get us all on to Central European Time....or double daylight savings time as it can alternatively be called.

How delightful you might think: just think of all that energy that can be saved by doing so....for that is one of the justifications put forward, that we would use less energy in the evenings as we'd have more natural light. Who can argue with such an idea in these climate change challenged days?

Well, I suppose I can argue with it, although that's not all that much of a...

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The day the fiscal rules died

So today's the day; the day Alistair Darling will confirm that Brown's current fiscal rules are to be scrapped.  Now, the rules have always been more of a fiddle than a useful economic tool - to meet the "golden rule" that the budget remains balanced over the course of the economic cycle, Brown blithely changed his definition of the economic cycle; and his use of off-balance sheet trickery to meet the "sustainable investment rule" is well-documented.  But the worry is that if those fiscal rules failed to constrain Brown, what will he...

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Daily Brief

Blythe Masters would like you to know that the credit default swaps market is working just fine, thank you very much.

Masters, who is now head of global commodities at J.P. Morgan, was one of the bankers in the early 1990s that helped create the credit derivatives market that has exploded into a $58 trillion murky mess at the heart of this credit crisis. (Read Jesse Eisinger's account of this here.) Credit default swaps were designed to offload risk from a bank's balance sheet by letting other investors bet on the default risk of those loans.

Warren Buffett famously...

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Quote of the day: Rupert's surprise

Michael Wolff on how Rupert Murdoch discovered there was more to Dow Jones than just the WSJ:

I don't believe he had any idea there was an enterprise side of the business. I believe I was the one to explain Factiva to him. He wanted the newspaper. The fact that after he bought the newspaper he found himself with these rather successful businesses was I think surprising to him. I think he was pleased.
 

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A grim statistic

According to the Financial Services Authority, home repossessions in the second quarter of 2008 were up 71 percent on the previous year.  With the financial and economic crises now biting even deeper, the figures for the third and fourth quarters of the year will most likely be even grimmer.  Of course, this tragic human element to the downturn presents a challenge to all the political parties: they need to devise ways to limit it.  But it also creates a particular problem for Gordon Brown: the more people feel the fiscal pain, the less likely they are to go along with the Our Economic Saviour narrative of the past few weeks.

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