| World laid bear
Don't forget that Gordon Brown's greatest trick has been spending like crazy and using off balance sheet finance (PFI) to make it look like his golden rule was intact. With funding for future PFI deals now looking broken Gord will have to take those 'investments' in public services back on balance sheet, also at the same time as Northern Rock goes back on balance sheet. Looks like debt/gdp of more like 50% than 40% to me. .
Dr. Abbas Bakhtiar: Iran and its Economy
Then there is allure of the real-state. If there is a natural pressure on the housing market and prices are rising, you put your money there; hoping that even if you don’t make much profit, at least your money would be safe from inflation. The point here is that in Iran excessive liquidity isn’t absorbed in productive long-term projects such as building factories, roads, etc. It is simply used for speculation in real-estate or other short term projects. The middle-classes are not the reservoir of this excess liquidity. They spend all their money on consumption. The excess liquidity is in the hands of the top 10% of the population who are earning unbelievable profits from speculating on anything from real-state to import and export of goods. The Housing Bubble When Dr.
Action Economics morning alert
Hildebrand commented that the credit crunch was likely to impact the Swiss economy but but said that the Swiss economy was well positioned to weather some of these risks. Comments from SNB's Roth last week stressed that the market should not believe that the Bank had finished its monetary tightening while earlier central bank comments have displayed more of a wait-and-see approach as the SNB wanted further information to assess the impact from the financial market turmoil and the associated credit crunch. 02:26 ET ECB calls for yuan appreciation. Executive board member Bini Smaghi was quoted in a newspaper interview this morning as saying that "in the last two years, the yuan has appreciated against the dollar by about 10 percent". He added that "the message from this G7 is that the yuan must also now be revalued against the euro".
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