Roger Taylor worked for some of the leading banks and investment houses in the City beforefounding his own hedge fund related, investment management business.
Our financial markets are in crisis, posing a threat to future economic prosperity. Although the stock market has yet to crack in any catastrophic way, the Bank of England (BOE) and the City are striving manfully to conceal the full extent of the meltdown in credit markets, the underlying collapse in the economic value of low-grade debt paper and the substantial threat to the balance sheets of even the largest financial institutions. The alarming images of the ‘run’ against the Northern Rock are a direct manifestation of this crisis.
Gordon Brown’s main claim to fame is the maintenance, under his stewardship, of relatively low interest rates over an extended period. The key to this has been correspondingly low levels of official inflation. Based upon the latest National Statistics data, the CPI measure of inflation (the BOE’s benchmark) stood at a meagre 1.9% in July 2007 with the RPI at 3.8%.