Budget 2010: live

18.25 The
Washington Post, meanwhile, reports:

In a letter to members of the G-20 group Friday, [President] Obama urged
them to avoid “consequential mistakes of the past when stimulus was too
quickly withdrawn.”

Nevertheless, Britain’s new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition went
ahead Tuesday with an emergency budget containing a package of spending cuts
and tax increases that will be worth $188 billion a year by 2014-15.

18.20 International coverage of today’s Budget
is rolling in. The
New York Times reports:

Read more

Hedge funds bet big on the falling euro

Traders and brokers told The Sunday Telegraph that hedge funds are
using a range of financial instruments to bet that the value of the euro
will fall. One trader said: “Shorting the euro is the biggest bet in town.

“We’re seeing big volumes in credit default swaps and short selling in
equities that are exposed to the euro.”

Gennaro Pucci, manager at Matrix, which manages £3bn, generated 19pc returns
last month in its €110m Global Credit Fund on bearish euro bets. Mr Pucci
told Bloomberg: “The ECB is buying debt at artificial levels, but that won’t
solve structural problems.”

Read more

BNP Paribas bankers share €500m bonus pool

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BNP Paribas will pay its 4,000 bankers €500 million (£434.7 million) in
bonuses after France’s biggest lender beat profit forecasts during the
fourth quarter.

Staff in London and Paris will , on average, earn a €125,000 bonus for 2009,
less than under the €1 billion bonus pool proposed last year by BNP Paribas
which was forced to halve compensation following pressure from French
President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Read more

HSBC bids farewell to dollar supremacy

“The dollar looks awfully like sterling after the First World War,”
said David Bloom, the bank‘s currency chief.

“The whole picture of risk-reward for emerging market currencies has
changed. It is not so much that they have risen to our standards, it is that
we have fallen to theirs. It used to be that sovereign risk was mainly an
emerging market issue but the events of the last year have shown that this
is no longer the case. Look at the UK – debt is racing up to 100pc of GDP,”
he said

Crucially, China and rising Asia have reached the point where they can no
longer keep holding down their currencies to boost exports because this is
causing mayhem to their own economies, stoking asset bubbles. Asia’s “mercantilist
mindset” of recent decades is about to be broken by the spectre of an
inflation spiral.

Read more

Thomas Cook owner needs aid

The German majority owner of travel firm Thomas Cook has warned it could go into administration within weeks until it gets emergency loans from Berlin.

However, there are increasing signs from both the German government and the European Commission that state aid will not be forthcoming for Arcandor.

Read more

Faith banking

By Robin Brant
Malaysia correspondent, BBC News, Kuala Lumpur

Experts in Islamic finance believe their way of doing business has shielded them from the global credit crisis.

But how does it differ from conventional Western finance

Read more

Ratings agencies admit mistakes

Credit rating agencies have admitted errors were made when assessing some of the financial instruments that have been blamed for the credit crunch.

Representatives of the three main agencies - Standard & Poor’s, Fitch, Moodys - were grilled by MPs on the Treasury Select Committee. Read more

Shop till you prop up the economy, Taiwan residents told

Shoppers in Taiwan will be handed more than $100 (£67) in redeemable vouchers in a government bid to beat the global credit crisis.

They will be valid in shops, restaurants and supermarkets in 2009. Read more

Barclays’ Gulf cash move attacked

Barclays’ plans to raise up to £7.3bn from the Middle East have been attacked by a key advisory group, the BBC has learned.

The criticism comes in a report by RREV, a body that recommends the UK’s institutional investors, such as the large pension funds. Read more

D Day for the Bank of England

At midday today the BoE monetary committee will decide on UK interest rates.

Bookmakers are banking on at least a half a percentage point drop whilst some are calling for a full point or more. Anything less than a half a percentage point drop will disappoint the already turbulant city and could send shares tumbelling even further down.

James Dale of the financial advice site said “The monetary committee has to reduce rates, and this is in contrast to the impact anything short of a serious drop would have on the city, the fact remains that UK rates are way higher than that of the Euro zone and completely immesurable against the US. During this global credit crisis , the UK must seek to attain the sorts of interest rates seen elsewhere in the leading world economies otherwise our recession will be deeper and longer lasting than other leading economies and could have a bearing on the UK standing in the world over the next 20 years.

Read more

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