Archive for October, 2009
Even though people are buying a lot more houses than half a year ago, the money is not flowing through the economy the way it should. The number of loans rose from 53k to 56k proving that it’s the highest during the six months period, but borrowers are trying to repay the debts as soon as they car therefore net mortgage lending rose only by £900m.
Lending to the biggest British sector: non-finacial private corporations fell by £400m and now it stands very low. Hopefully it will stop falling by the end of the year, because banking really depends on it. In the mean time banks will try to push through to more customers to steadily pull the country from the crisis.
During the last two weeks UK retailers have started switching to private courier companies because of the Royal Mail employees strike. Most of the companies are afraid of consumers stopping to shop online, because of the delays and uncertainty behind Royal Mail. There is no wonder that RM has the best cost-to-service ratio for certain size of parcels, but the increased affection to RM forced retailers to use couriers even though the cost is higher.
On the other hand private couriers are happy to accept any overflow of work to be done that RM cannot do because of the strike and many of these companies are pretty sure that they have won their new clients for good. Definitely next weeks will prove whether this is true or not.
It has already been six months since house prices have started to rise. Very worrying state of the market have left us with uncertainty and continues to grow bad feelings about the economy. Accordingly to the closed watched index, the prices are still on the rise, but slower than during the summer, it’s slowing down. It is still 13.1 per cent form the peak which we have seen in 2007 but experts agree that the marked received a boost after the mortgages have been lowered after October 2007.
The very sluggish improvement in the time needed for the properties to become available on the market also means that there is a slowdown in the constructions area. Maybe this time development companies will learn how to build and finish their jobs properly.
Barclays has started to make some really good moves recently. They already are getting stronger on the market, but this time they were granted a really good deal. Standard Life Bank was bought for much less than analysts expected, just £226m. Specialists estimated that the price the company was bought for its 23 per cent discounted and its standard value would be £293m.
Meanwhile Barclays have spotted a niche in the market for mortgages ad extended the mortgage share on the marked also increasing their profit. The shares fell last Friday by 2.45 per cent while Standard Life Bank share closed down 1.5 per cent.
Source: FT.com
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