Last night on the 10 o’clock news, the BBC’s respected and influential economics editor, Stephanie Flanders, revealed how little she knows about the true workings of the economy.

If you're less than thrilled by today's World Cup kick-off, fret not: there's plenty of good sport elsewhere on television. My favourite viewing is the disintegration of Labour's effort to defend its disgraceful record in government. Some of the own goals are spectacular. Faced with the horror of exclusion from office for at least five years, former ministers – Ed Balls, Lord Myners and others – are rewriting their part in the policies that helped wreck the United Kingdom's social cohesion and financial solidity. Not since Shaggy's chart-topping song It Wasn't Me have we been treated to such a ridiculous attempt at self-exculpation.

The euro is under threat - along with our entire free-market system, warns Edmund Conway in today's Telegraph.

It is now accepted, even by Angela Merkel, that as Europe battles its financial crisis, the very fate of the euro is at stake. Her belated discovery of this home truth is welcome, but she does not go far enough. The real concern is that the crisis bubbling on the other side of the Channel represents a make-or-break moment for globalisation.

From Damon Vrabel, Canada Free Press.

Between the SEC charges and the congressional panels, the government is finally doing its job going after Goldman Sachs, right?  And this last week in April ends with the Justice Department picking up the baton, which puts Goldman under threat of criminal prosecution.  Things have suddenly gotten serious.

The Treasury acknowledged privately as early as 2004 that a burgeoning buy-to-let market could be crowding out first-time buyers, according to a government report released by campaigners who lambast the authorities for allowing the landlord boom to continue regardless.

The housing market may now be trapped in a long-term bear market and may not bounce back to the peaks it reached in 2007 for generations, a leading economic consultancy has warned.

The former prime minister Tony Blair has received millions of pounds through an unusual mixture of commercial, charitable and religious income streams. Since he stepped down from office in 2007, his financial affairs have been described by observers as "Byzantine" and "opaque". The Guardian is now launching an online competition offering a prize to the person who can shine the brightest light on those financial structures.

Labour's strategy for tackling poverty has reached the end of the road and Britain risks a return to Victorian levels of inequality, according to a major two-year study seen by The Independent.

The leaders were still shadow-boxing at the Confederation of British Industry conference yesterday. In the red corner Gordon Brown thumped out his warning that "choking off recovery too soon would be fatal". In the blue corner David Cameron hit back, warning again of an austerity budget "within 50 days" of taking power: "Tackling the deficit is not an alternative to growth, it is a big bit of it."

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and HBOS were secretly kept afloat with £62 billion of emergency Government support at the height of the credit crisis last year, it was revealed today.

The Bank of England kept the massive liquidity injections secret until today, when it judged calm had been restored and there was no longer any need for secrecy.

The undisclosed support began for HBOS on October 1, two weeks after the collapse of America's Lehman Brothers and when financial markets were at their most panicky, and peaked at £25.4 billion on November 13. The money was eventually repaid on January 16.

RBS began tapping the Bank for liquidity on October 7 and at its peak borrowed £36.6 billion. It paid back all the money by December 16.

Both banks eventually provided the Bank with collateral with a value in excess of £100 billion. They were also charged fees by the Bank.

The so-called Emergency Liquidity Assistance was on top of billions of pounds of other support through loans and guarantees and the £37 billion of equity investment pledged to both banks and Lloyds TSB, which later took over HBOS.

The Bank, in evidence to MPs today, said in exceptional circumstances it acted as "lender of last resort" to financial institutions in difficulty. It said it had decided to use its powers to prevent disclosure of the support in its 2009 Annual Report.

"In most cases, confidence can best be sustained if the Bank's support is disclosed only when the conditions that gave rise to potentially systemic disturbance have improved to a point where the disclosure itself should not be a cause of such disturbance."

With RBS signed up for the Asset Protection Scheme, an insurance policy protecting it against losses on its toxic assets, and Lloyds embarked on its own £22.5 billion capital-raising scheme, "the Bank considers the need for secrecy has ceased," it said.

The disclosure is likely to intensify complaints from HBOS and Lloyds shareholders that they were not given the full picture when they were offered shares in earlier rights issues by the two banks in January. The Financial Services Authority is already investigating HBOS for alleged lapses in disclosure.

Lloyds revealed today the pricing for its record £13.5 billion rights issue which will see every British household sink a further £228 each into the lender.

As part of the fundraising, the Government will today plough another £5.7 billion of taxpayers' money into the bank that has already received £17 billion in state money, giving Britons a 43 per cent stake in the bank.

Today, Lloyds is demanding another £13.5 billion from its nearly three million shareholders to avoid the need for costly state insurance of its bad debt. It is doing this by selling 1.34 new shares to investors for every one share they already own priced at 37p.

 

Source: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article6929451.ece

Here is The Globe's second interview with Niall Ferguson. He shares some interesting thoughts about destabilisation - both monetary and socially, and the road ahead.

Money Morning has described Britain as now being “actually insolvent” compared to being “technically insolvent” when it went begging to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1976.