Fly Posting

At the London Summit , the G20 ministers are trying to get away with the biggest April Fools trick of all time. Their tax-dodging, bonus-guzzling, pension-pinching, unregulated free market world's in meltdown, and those fools think we're going to bail them out. They've gotta be joking!

http://www.g-20meltdown.org/

Its a Numbers Game

'Run on UK' sees foreign investors pull $1 trillion out of the City

Some $597.5bn was lost to the banks in the last quarter of last year alone, after a modest positive inflow in the summer, but a massive $682.5bn haemorrhaged in the second quarter of 2008 – a record. About 15 per cent of the monies held by foreigners in the UK were withdrawn over the period, leaving about $6 trillion. This is by far the largest withdrawal of foreign funds from the UK in recent decades – about 10 times what might flow out during a "normal" quarter.

Colin Ellis, an economist at Daiwa Securities, commented: "The outflow of overseas banks' UK holdings is not surprising – indeed foreign investors in general will still be smarting from the sharp fall in the exchange rate last year, as many UK liabilities are priced in sterling terms. That raises the question of what could possibly tempt overseas investors to return to the UK.

Answers on a postcard to: .....

Monopoly money

More trouble in store for sterling

Official preparations to flood the economy with cash may prompt sterling to retest 23-year lows against the dollar and analysts say all graphs point down for the pound if it breaks lower.

The central bank voted unanimously in February to ask finance minister Alistair Darling for permission to begin quantitative easing, which it would do either by buying government bonds or corporate assets.

Darling was quoted on Tuesday as saying the BoE could start buying assets this week with newly created money.

Do you believe in monetary 'creationism'?