U.K. Chancellor George Osborne says Britain could start selling 100-year bonds as the country tries to reduce the government’s long term debt costs.
The Debt Management Office said that initial talks with investors were positive, and the perpetual ‘century’ bonds will mean that the long-term cost of servicing part of Britain’s debt would remain at the current record low interest rates for a significantly long period of time.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron has suggested putting a minimum price on all alcohol purchases nation-wide, after claiming that the alcohol abuse “scandal” was costing the National Health Service (NHS) over £2.7 billion ($4.24 billion) annually.
The Prime Minister signalled that he was ready to throw his weight behind a plan, which is already being implemented in Scotland, where supermarkets and pubs would be forced to charge a minimum of 45p ($0.71) per unit of alcohol.
Can having more money make you happier? A report from Britain thinks otherwise: Britons have become richer in the last 60 years but they are also more stressed.
According to a recent report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), Britons are a lot more stressed from work, citing longer working hours and a rise in unemployment as the key causes.
Furthermore, the report claims that the number of households without a single source of income has increased from 4 percent in 1952 to the current 18.8 percent.
The city of London could soon be flooded with billions of dollars worth of Chinese money, said a report by Reuters on Sunday, after UK finance minister George Osborne announced a landmark deal that sees London teaming up with Hong Kong to develop a offshore trading centre for the Renminbi.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron has offered Scottish people the opportunity to vote on a possible breakaway from the rest of the United Kingdom, but only if the referendum occurs within the next 18 months and be legally binding without any option for greater devolved powers, reported the BBC on Monday.
The UK’s financial regulatory bodies have shown a surprising “hear no evil” attitude to criminality in its banking and financial sector. At times, the financial regulators almost seemed to want to pretend that criminality and fraud didn’t, or couldn’t exist in the domain they are supposed to police. Unless this issue is addressed, London risks losing its mantle as a world leading financial centre.
For the fifth month in a row, consumer confidence in the United Kingdom declined, dragging the index to an all-time low for the month of November. Worries about the eurozone crisis and the slowing domestic economy have affected consumers’ pessimism, according to the key survey by Nationwide.
The monthly survey showed a sharp deterioration in consumers’ expectations for the job market and economy, with only 13 percent of respondents expecting the economic situation to be good in six month’s time.
Unemployment has reached 2.57 million across the United Kingdom as the economic downturn, combined with long term trends towards youth unemployment, saw jobless figures rise again.
The U.K. statistics agency said the ranks of the unemployed swelled by 114,000 to 2.57 million in the three months to the end of August, raising the jobless rate to 8.1%.
Chancellor George Osborne is targeting Britain’s “squeezed middle” to support his budget which aims to tighten the Treasury’s grip over public spending. What can 25 million tax payers expect? Well, income personal tax allowance is expected to be increased by £600 next year, fund a £250m shared equity scheme for new homes and inflation increases in petrol duty.
London’s change-makers have often found a home on the City’s eastern fringe—especially immigrants and artists—
but in recent decades their wares have usually been cultural rather than commercial.
In 2008, though, followers of the technology industry began to talk excitedly about a cluster of internet start-ups
in the Shoreditch area, near the ugly Old Street junction, to the north-east of the financial district.
