British mortgage lending rose strongly again, building society mortgage approvals hit a record high and money supply growth picked up in January, bolstering the case for higher interest rates this year. ‘It seems highly likely that interest rates will rise further still before long,’ said Howard Archer, an economist Global Insight. The British Bankers’...
Read more »
The yen fell for a fourth day as the Bank of Japan said interest-rate increases will be gradual, after policy makers raised borrowing costs for the second time in eight months. Japan’s currency declined after the central bank, which voted 8-1 to increase its overnight lending rate a quarter percentage point to 0.5 percent,...
Read more »
The Internet has been buzzing over the last few months with discomfort about various new controls and impositions placed on the user in the different versions of Vista. We realised that like many users, we really hadn’t spent much time (OK any) looking at the End User License Agreement (EULA). What we did find...
Read more »
This month saw the average London house push through the £250,000 barrier, leading to calls to raise stamp duty tax thresholds as Londoners get hit with the double whammy of higher prices and higher taxes. According to BN prices of top apartments in London broke through fresh records last month. 1976, you may recall,...
Read more »
According to the London Financial Times Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s idiosyncratic leader, may be dispensing Hennessy cognac and Cartier watches to his cronies for a little while longer, thanks to a 300-year-old territorial dispute between the UK and Spain. The FT reports that the ban was agreed by the United Nations last October as...
Read more »