Debt owed to the government, approximately £22.6 billion, originates from many sources including unpaid fees, taxes, fines and loans, ineligible benefits or grants and unrecovered costs from court cases. (more…)
Chancellor George Osborne is to pay off the UK government’s remaining debt from World War One, the Treasury has announced.
The government will repay the outstanding £1.9bn of debt from a 3.5% War Loan on 9 March 2015. (more…)
Why have markets been rising?
Well this is always a conundrum, and explanations from the great and the good abound everywhere. However, there is one aspect that is often ignored, as most seem to follow what the institutions and private investors do as they chase their fashion fads into various asset classes of the day. They often overlooked issue is what the companies actually do themselves. It seems that in the US there has been a growing propensity just for companies to buy their own shares back. With the cost of debt being pretty cheap there is a logic for companies to buy some of their own stock back, reducing the number of shares in issue and thus increase earnings per share for investors – oh yes and improve the value of the executive stock options as well!
So here we are, still faced with a huge deficit, and although it has come down over the past few years, it is now showing signs of flat-lining and even rising slightly. The Tories claim they have the answer, and I expect Mr Milliband says the same although he just forgot to mention it, and we await somewhat wearily the views of the others. So are we stuck in a funk and unable to retrieve the situation and just doomed to be sucked into the Slough of Despond?
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The good news is the rate of global gross domestic product (GDP) growth increased during the second quarter, according to The Economist. Greater economic strength in developed countries helped push the world’s GDP 2.4 percent higher during the second quarter of 2013 as compared to the second quarter of 2012. That’s only the third time that has happened in three years. The bad news, according to The Economist, is:
