Federal Reserve governor Ben Bernanke and Bank of England governor Mervyn King both used to be teachers. I’m glad I wasn’t a student in their classes.

The Fed’s plan to bailout indebted consumers and mortgage holders may sound impressive on paper (remember when $800 billion sounded like a lot of money), but it may just be “spitting in the wind.”

The dollar rallies big time!  A dollar conspiracy?  Bailing out the automakers?  Weathering the storm in N.Z.?
And Now… Today’s Pfennig!

There seems to be two important consensuses coming from the world’s pre-eminent economic minds. One is that the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve are setting the economy down a dark path. The other is that the guys in charge of the Federal Reserve are the only ones who don’t realize this.

When Gordon Brown sold half our gold reserves all those years ago, it almost precisely marked the end of the yellow metal’s long bear market.

The UK economy is being battered by cost shocks from abroad.

The credit crunch is a red herring. Everyone blames it for everything that goes wrong in the economy.

I really wouldn’t like to be the man in charge of sorting out the UK economy today. Almost every piece of economic data so far this week has been as bad as it could be.

Later today at noon, to be precise the Bank of England will announce its latest decision on interest rates. So what’s it going to do? The question is a lot harder to answer this month than we’ve been used to for the last few years.

Attacked from all sides…Bankers launch their defence…But do we really need them here anyway?