Slovenia's economy shrank by 2.8% on a year-on-year basis in the last three months of 2011, data just released showed. That follows a 0.5% contraction in the previous quarter, making Slovenia one of several eurozone countries in recession.Shame. Nice place, Slovenia. I once spent a happy long weekend in Ljubljana ...
The European Central Bank will on Wednesday step up its campaign to stabilise the euro, forestall a new credit crunch and shore up troubled banks by flooding the markets with hundreds of billions' worth of easy money for the second time in two months.So the ECB lends vast amounts to the banks at a paltry interest rate who then proceed to buy up the sovereign debt of peripheral countries, yielding a much better rate of interest. So everyone's happy: the banks make a tidy profit, the peripheral countries sell off their debt more cheaply than would otherwise be the case and the ECB is lauded for bringing aboout financial stability. It's just like magic.
The offer of three-year loans to banks at the cheap interest rate of 1% represents a boon for the banking sector in the troubled eurozone periphery, and is broadly seen as a masterstroke by ECB president Mario Draghi of Italy (pictured), who launched the policy in December in one of his first moves as president.
Analysts speculate that the take-up of what amounts to a eurozone policy of quantitative easing could reach €1tn (£850bn) when the funds are made available, the expectation is that the borrowing will roughly equal the first round of lending in December when more than 500 EU banks netted €489bn.
Did Cameron not consult DWP before appointing Ms Harrison? If not, why not? If so, why did DWP not tell him about the fraud allegations? Is the government that dysfunctional?
Warnings that police were investigating fraud allegations involving Emma Harrison's company were not passed to David Cameron before he appointed her as his "families tsar", Downing Street said yesterday.
It sought to distance the Prime Minister from the controversy as it stressed he was unaware of the inquiry into the alleged misuse of public money at her firm, A4e. The Department of Work and Pensions is understood to have been told by the company about the investigation in November.
But it appeared not to have relayed that information to Number 10. A month later, Mr Cameron appointed her an adviser on helping problem families get off benefits and into work. She was unpaid in her post, but A4e won further Government contracts worth £400,000.
In my view, the greatest threat to the euro is that Greece will make a success of default and devaluation. Something like it has happened several times before, notably with Argentina in 2002, when it defaulted and devalued. The country went from an appalling financial crisis to growing by 11pc in the space of 18 months.Firewalls round the voters? Silly question. You impose technocratic administrations on those countries which fail to perceive the benefits of austerity and then you send in the Brussels bureaucrats to run their economies. Who cares about the voters? Ask the Greeks ...
Suppose that once the new drachma has fallen by 30pc to 50pc, Greece begins to show signs of growth. How would it then be possible to persuade the electorate of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and even Ireland, that there is no alternative to years of misery? It is all very well building firewalls to stop financial contagion, but how do you build firewalls around the voters?
I love it when academics turn their erudite brains to everyday subjects. My favourite is the study by Tania Sanchez, whose institute spent years of research on perfume to discover what scent most drives men wild: "We discovered," she said, "it is bacon."
Now the psychological benefits of working with horses are being recognised by growing numbers of therapists who work with autistic children, young people with behavioural problems, adults with depression or celebrities with addictions.Didn't do Lorraine Kelly any good, did it?
"The horse is the perfect mirror, they are very emotional beings; we're only starting to realise how intelligent they are," said therapy counsellor Gabrielle Gardner, of Shine For Life, watching the horse dance around his pen at a farm in Blackstone, a village a few miles north of Brighton.
Speaking after a Friends of Syria conference, held in Tunisia, Mrs Clinton said that Russia and China must join international condemnation of President Assad's regime. "It's quite distressing to see two permanent members of the Security Council using their veto while people are being murdered – women, children, brave young men – houses are being destroyed," she said.
"It is just despicable and I ask whose side are they on? They are clearly not on the side of the Syrian people."Now, if you take Mrs Clinton's statement and substitute "Palestinian" for "Syrian", you may find that it is a rather different permanent member of the Security Council which has, over the years and not infrequently, been using its veto.
The freedom of women in France is very much a matter of words, and I think it is intimately related to language. As with many Latin languages, the masculine form trumps everything when it comes to grammatical agreement of adjectives and so forth. We say Un Français et trente millions de Françaises sont contents; those 30 million French women have to be contents in the masculine form as dictated by their one male companion, rather than contentes as they would be without him.I would normally place myself with those who consider that there are more important things in life. But Madame puts her case most elegantly.
A lot of men tell us that we are fighting the wrong battle, that we should fight first for wage equality, or against the glass ceiling. But words matter. Let's imagine unmarried men having to tick the box Mon Damoiseau, the medieval equivalent of Ma Demoiselle. The boys soon stopped allowing people to call them bird, with its insinuation of virginity. Whereas I, at the age of 43, still get called "Mademoiselle", literally "my little hen". Charmant, non?
Taxpayer-backed Royal Bank of Scotland remained at the heart of the row over bankers' pay today as it unveiled total losses of £2 billion for 2011 at the same time as paying £785 million in bonuses to its staff.
RBS, which is 82% state-owned after receiving a £45.5 billion bailout at the height of the financial crisis, said the bonus pool included £390 million for its 17,000 investment bankers.
Controversial plans to make it easier for companies to "hire and fire" workers may be revived by George Osborne in next month's Budget.It won't actually do anything to improve the UK's economy, but it will keep the Tory backbenchers happy.
"In the end, males are uncertain little creatures and the way they are made is very different in mammals, birds, insects and worms," said Steve Jones, author of the book Y: The Descent of Man and professor of genetics at University College London.Not exactly comforting. But this "uncertain little creature" is far from down-hearted; after all, a world of females would not necessarily be a Bad Thing. I think ...
"In the long term we are all dead, and that is certainly going to be true for the Y chromosome, which is rather an arriviste on the evolutionary scene. It may take a long time, but I am pretty confident that the Y machine will, one day, be replaced by something else. Quite what that will be, you will have to ask me in a hundred million years."
Well I can think of a few winners, notably those damn bankers who despite having caused the problem did very nicely on their bonuses."Someone with a £100,000 pension pot, who could have expected that to yield an annual pension of a little under £7,000 three years ago, would now get just under £6,000. That is a rather substantial income loss. But it is only part of the story," he said."Those pension funds will typically have been invested in a mix of bonds and equities. The rise in asset prices as a result of QE also raises the value of the pension pot, providing an offset to the fall in annuity rates."He added that pensioners should not expect to be immune to the downturn. While savers have been hit by record low interest rates, working households have been squeezed by a 7.5pc fall in real incomes, compared with where they would have otherwise been, as well as rising unemployment.
"Real household income declined a total of 2.5pc in the two years after output troughed, whereas in normal conditions it might have been expected to rise about 5pc in that time," Mr Bean said.
He added: "Savers have every right to feel aggrieved at losing out; after all, they did nothing to cause the financial crisis. But neither did most of those in work, who have seen a substantial squeeze in their real incomes. And unemployment, particularly among the young, has risen. There have been few winners over the past few years."
