How quickly things change! With lightening speed, words enter our language and trip off the tongue while others are discarded, just as rapidly. The Oxford English Dictionary grants official status to new words with every edition. The British press wait eagerly, for the list of what is in and what is out. I really wonder how they can continue to keep up now. This isn’t just the language of the street we’re talking about either.

Six months ago, if someone had asked you what credit crunch meant, what would you have said? I thought a lot about this. I’m sure I would have thought it was an exotic breakfast cereal, perhaps including some freeze dried strawberries that counted as one of my 5 a day… Continue reading »

You can’t open a paper, go online or turn on the TV at the moment, without hearing about or seeing something about mortgages. In the US, it all started with sub-prime and here in the UK, the knock on effect began with Northern Rock. (I quite like that our government now owns a bank called Northern Rock, it sounds kinds cool, like a music festival!) The images of crowds outside a bank made it all seem a bit ominous. Bad news was surely coming for us all. Continue reading »

So it’s all peachy, then. Despite the recent meltdown of Bear Stearns, the “near-catastrophe” that was avoided, and the scrabblings in the Federal Reserve, we can just relax and breathe a collective sigh of relief. According to one of the analysts at Lehman Brothers, the worst of the credit crisis is over:

“Events in the past couple of days indicate that global equity markets have moved on from discounting the recessionary impact of lower earnings to considering the implications of a systemic reduction in the availability of credit to otherwise profitable businesses and creditworthy households.”

Umm, I beg your pardon?

“We think this likely represents the culmination of the current crisis in capital markets.”

Oh, jolly good. …But I thought Lehman Brothers was flagged as one of the next most likely US banks to crumble after Bear Stearns? Continue reading »