Morgan Stanley Airhead to Join Monetary Policy Committee

'Maria' wrote this:

Mr Miles is obviously very/not very confident:

".....it may well be that the worst of the recession may well be behind us."

Mr Miles added: "That's not a confident prediction but a judgment about what may be the case."

I hope he will not be basing his vote on that judgement.

Mheh. Well spotted.

He's hedging his bets, and hedging the hedges.

Get out the hedgeclippers - it would be nice to see what is really going on without various interested parties muddying the water with their wishful thinking.

Things will be better when they're better.

Business-wise I detect some improvement, but then I've been selling like crazy so it's hard to tell. Your impression?

We were doing great guns up to about the middle of March, but only around pay day - now it's slumping. We usually sell a lot over the Easter Weekend, but it was really quiet this time, in spite of the poor weather. Orders are down about 40%.

Though I would have to add that our orders are dependent on our ranking well in Google, so there is another factor there! I haven't checked - it does my head in if I discover that we have fallen down the ranks and I end up spending ages fiddling with the site to try and optimise it more.

'DVH' wrote this:

Ooh ...in which case Brown will be bawling at him, having blamed the shadow banking system for all his troubles!

The effect of financial stimulus, is to stimulate the economy; by it's very nature it muddies the waters as the injection is non-productive. What we need to consider is, what is the possibility of the economy standing on its own two feet without further correction?

Well, without reinflating the balloon in opaque debt devices, I would say it's probably pretty minimal at this point.. Obviously, there's no point in taking this route as we already know where it leads and next time the correction will just be even harder. However, it does appear that certain people are very keen on getting this runaway real-estate gravy-train back on the tracks.. they may even manage it . God help us ..