In the pre-budget speech, Alastair Darling predicted a deep but short recession, ending next year. This made me think what a joy maths is for political spin. Remember technically a recession is “two successive quarters of negative growth (shrinking)”. Let me use an example. What recession ending really means… GDP (Gross Domestic Product) basically means the size...

In a past blog ‘Mental Health and Debt‘ I wrote about our plans to produce a free guide to help individuals, families and carers. Just a quick update on it. I had hired a couple of high level psychiatrists to write the mental health side of the guide, however after the first draft, unfortunately nothing came back....

To many readers of this blog, I suspect the note above will be a bit like stating the bleedin’ obvious. Yet recently I’ve heard from a number of different sources at banks, that when using this site’s template letters, that’s exactly what a small, but significant number of people do. The letters are contained in a variety...

There’s a stock market theory I remember talking about during the 2000-1 dot com boom, (I can’t remember who first told me a version of it) when I was on Simply Money TV. Over the last couple of years or so I’ve mentioned it when chatting about house prices to various friends, so I thought it worth...

Last night, I was lucky enough to be invited to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Guildhall. Filled with the political and financial elite, dressed up to the tens, it was a fascinating evening, and like slipping back into history at points. It’s a very formal do to celebrate the appointment of the new Lord Mayor (the...

I’ve been invited to the Lord Mayor’s dinner on Monday night. It’s about financial literacy, and the PM’s making a speech. All good except I just found out it is WHITE tie. Now black tie I can cope with, but WHITE tie, tops and tails… oh dear! Comment and Discuss