Hamish McRae

One of the country’s most respected financial journalists and commentators Hamish McRae is an associate editor of The Independent. He was named Business and Finance Journalist of the Year 2006 at the British Press Awards.

Hamish McRae: We will have to beat inflation the hard way

Inflation is back, in everything but house prices that is. One of the many dreadful aspects of the tragedy in Burma is that getting food supplies to the region is vastly more difficult that it would have been a year ago. This is not just because global food prices are higher – up some 50 per cent year on year according to the United Nations – but obtaining substantial quantities of even such basics as rice is sometimes impossible.

Recently by Hamish McRae

Hamish McRae: We will never have cheap oil again

Wednesday, 30 April 2008

When this wave of higher oil prices subsides, is it going to be business as usual? After the oil shocks of the 1970s and early 1980s, the oil price came back down and we went pretty much back to our bad old ways.

Hamish McRae: After the £50bn bail-out, how are we placed?

Wednesday, 23 April 2008

So what happens next? We have just had a £50bn bail-out for the banks under the Bank of England's "special liquidity scheme" to free-up the mortgage debt they cannot sell and so start to tackle the mortgage famine. We will have further interest rate cuts, though these may take some time to come through. But will these measures succeed in reviving the housing market? And, more broadly, how well placed is the UK to cope with a general global economic slowdown?

Hamish McRae: The £40bn question: do we bail out the banks to get the mortgage market moving?

Wednesday, 16 April 2008

In the next few days the Treasury and the Bank of England will announce their plan to rescue the mortgage market. It will be huge. The big number will have to be about £40bn and it may be quite a bit larger than that. This would be in addition to the £15bn fed into the markets yesterday by the Bank of England on more conventional terms.

Hamish McRae: It's back to the world of proper saving and borrowing for homes – and the better for it

Wednesday, 9 April 2008

We all knew it was going to happen but yesterday it did: an evident sudden lurch downwards in house prices. The fall of 2.5 per cent in March as recorded by the Halifax follows several months of softness in the housing market but it always takes a while for prices to respond to market forces. Not everyone has to sell and people don't like dropping their price. But eventually prices reflect supply and demand. Suddenly, there is the spectre of negative equity, that beast of the early Nineties, again stalking the land.

Hamish McRae: Has the US averted financial catastrophe?

Wednesday, 2 April 2008

More evidence of recession in the US; a huge Swiss bank heads into loss and gets rid of its chairman; more signs of housing weakness here in the UK; profound gloom in Japanese business. Yet amid this gathering financial storm share prices have steadied, even risen a bit. Why?

Hamish McRae: This is serious. But don't panic, it is no worse than other recent downturns

Wednesday, 19 March 2008

Will cheap money rescue the US economy – and at one remove, the world economy? And what does all this stuff that is flying around mean for us?

Hamish McRae: In the face of a downturn, Darling will only make matters worse if he pushes up taxes

Wednesday, 12 March 2008

It's that day again. Alistair Darling's first Budget may not have quite the theatrical impact that the event had a decade or more ago, and not just because the present chancellor is, with the possible exception of John Major, less charismatic than any of his recent predecessors. The latter presentations of Gordon Brown had become pretty low-key affairs too.

Hamish McRae: The squeeze on public spending has begun

Wednesday, 5 March 2008

Things are going wrong. We are a week away from the Budget, one that seems likely to be the most sombre since Labour took power in 1997. It is Alistair Darling's misfortune that he should be the poor chap that has to present it. What should we look for next Wednesday?

Hamish McRae: The Chinese get things done – at a cost

Wednesday, 27 February 2008

Lord Foster makes the point succinctly: China has managed to design and build a new airport terminal twice the size of Heathrow's Terminal Five in four years, less time than the Heathrow planning enquiry. He should know, for he has designed both terminals. China's new terminal opens this week and Heathrow's next month, but Beijing Capital airport differs in another respect. It has also, in the past four years, built a third runway, something that will clearly take somewhat longer here.

Hamish McRae: We've lived in a land of plenty since pioneer wagons rolled across the prairie. Now times are getting leaner

Sunday, 24 February 2008

It was a week when things perked up for the UK economy: strong retail sales figures, some evidence of house prices stabilising, and a little cheer for Alistair Darling as January proved an even better month for tax receipts than had seemed likely. But it was also a week when the oil price went back over $100, reminding us that the world's oil supply/demand relationship remains very tight.

More hamish mcrae: