Idiocy reigns. "A member of the Bank of England's rate-setting committee said that mortgages which leave buyers with an immediate risk of negative equity should not be banned and that bank demands for big deposits from homeowners may have been "overdone." Kate Barker, who was commissioned by the Government to write a report on the housing market several years ago, said “I’m not pe...

Homeowners struggling to pay their mortgages should be able to sell part of the equity in their homes to avoid repossession the Liberal Democrats have said.

The UK's intelligence listening post may sell specialist technology to help safeguard companies from online attacks

This is interesting: Defined benefit (DB) pension liabilities of some of the world largest banks are now significantly greater than the bank’s equity market value, according to Pension Capital Strategies (PCS). The advisory firm’s latest report on the FTSE100 pension schemes revealed equity investments held by the pension schemes of HBOS, Lloyds TSB and RBS may outstrip the bank’...

Rewind almost three years and the trade union movement was embroiled in a bitter media spat with the private equity industry. We were asked to produce the evidence that private equity firms increased risk for the companies they acquired. Well, the evidence is now here.

OT, but how about a running total of the value of "equity" raised in debt-for-equity swaps now that plenty of companies are getting in on the game. Would be useful to know how much taxpayers money ISN'T being wasted on Gordon buying equity.

One reason that new technology is so slow to break through is the fact that it's organised by big business and government. Once people realise that they can take control of their own energy planning, the technology already exists to get rid of the oil companies, the power companies and the mass-produced car companies. If Greens really want to be Green, they can just do it, like this guy is doing. ...

The Office for National Statistics released a report on sickness absence earlier this week. It shows that sickness rates have fallen since 2001. In a typical week, 2.5% of people are off work compared to 3.3% in 2001. Call centre workers, with an absence rate of 4.8%, top the sickness table and are getting some stick from the newspapers. I sympathise with them. Who'd want to sit wired up to a...

If you take the distribution of loan-to-value figures from Chart 1.9 to The Bank of England's latest Financial Stability Report, then subject to a few assumptions*, the cumulative total number of households in neqative equity for each 5% fall in house prices is as follows:* The assumptions are: there are 11.8 million outstanding mortgages; mortgagors have no other financial assets or liabilities; ...

UNI has put out a useful little report (PDF) looking at pension fund investment in private equity as an asset class. It helpfully points out where the labour movement has representation in the funds that are investing in PE (actually this is quite common). It's another sign that unions are developing another element to their engagement with private equity. So far we've had the air war - ...