Each morning I walk past a large Sir Robert McAlpine site. I’m impressed by the speed of build, the cleanliness, the apparent high safety standards and a general feel of efficiency. This morning I missed breakfast so I stopped at a cafe to buy a snack to eat on the hoof. A Sir Robert McAlpine traffic marshall walked in. “Can I have three lattes, please,” he asked politely as he reached into his wallet. Was I witnessing the death of…
A massive leap in retail sales. Excellent news surely. But no. Even if you are in the shopfitting business, this is does not make comfortable reading. On figures like these the markets are pricing in interest rate rises. This reaction encouraged, do doubt, in part by the tough words by the Governor of the Bank of England on targeting inflation at the annual Mansion House speech. Sadly bad news remains just that, as we see further evidence of the weak…
When asked to do this blog I had hoped to steer clear of indulging in raw comment. But, even as cynical as I have become as a journalist over twenty odd years, I had not expected to encounter such fundamental ignorance and dithering as I see within Government ahead of an impending crisis. Let’s keep it simple and ignore the fine detail.
Construction is heading for two years of recession says the Construction Products Association in its latest forecast. It puts output down 1.3% this year and 1.6% next year, before a sluggish recovery starts in 2010. The net result is that activity will fall by more than 5% from the where it was in the first quarter of this year and reach levels roughly equivalent to those in 2004. That means we can expect to see around 200,000 jobs axed from…
The new parlour game for economists seems to be guessing where the bottom is for house prices. The latest consensus position seems to be coming in at about 20% judging by reports in the Guardian and the FT. But that will be an average, so get ready for stories of houses sold at half price.
The Observer this Sunday claimed 70,000 fewer homes would be built this year. We face the biggest post-War slump in house building it said after interviewing Barratt chief Mark Clare. Frankly that would be carnage and, if the figure proves anywhere near accurate, it would mean a cut of about £8 billion in workload for the construction industry. Put another way that represents about 7% of total industry workload and equivalent to a cut in one year of more construction…
Confidence in the US housing market has been further dented by a sharp rise in foreclosure (repossessions) in May according to RealtyTrac figures.
It flies in the face of other house price measures, but the FT house price survey puts prices in England and Wales up by 2.7% on a year ago, despite a 0.6% fall in May.
Employment in the wider economy continued to grow but there was a jump of 38,000 in the number of unemployed in the three months to April, official figures show. Rising unemployment is seen as a key factor in determining the shape of the economic slowdown and if it rises sharply may open the floodgates to distressed sales of homes. The latest figures show no sign of any great slump in construction employment, despite the waves of jobs lost from house…
I have a lot of time for Mervyn King’s comments. Here’s one from today that I think is worth a look. It is from his speech to the British Bankers’ Association on “Banking and the Bank of England”. “It is often said that the role of a central bank is to take the punch bowl away just as the party is getting going. That approach has served us well in monetary policy. But all those efforts will come to naught…