CrunchTimes

The smoking ban gave them the cancer, and it’s been exacerbated by the recession. Beer sales are at their lowest since the Great Depression in the 1930s, a missed business opportunity on both occasions you might say, misery likes company, especially the drunken kind. However, thousands of local pubs are shutting down, and I think [...]

What many people do not know is that we have a second national debt – one that is kept out of government figures and hidden from view. This is the public sector pension debt, which has grown as successive governments have continued to promise public sector workers defined benefit pensions, often worth two thirds of final salary, index-linked for life. It is now equivalent to 78% of GDP (£1.1trillion) with the cost of servicing the debt each year to pay for these unfunded schemes now at £45.2 billion.

“We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all labourers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the [...]

The first co-ordinated central bank action since the September 11 attacks drew a muted response from markets as cash-starved lenders called for even deeper intervention.
The US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and two other institutions joined forces to offer over £55bn in emergency loans to the world’s beleaguered banking system. [...]