Today the UK government launched their last attempt to unfreeze the credit markets with a three pronged bank loan scheme: Working Capital Scheme – cost £10bn – provides a 50% guarantee on £20 billion of short term loans to businesses with a turnover of less than £500m with banks having to register a portfolio of […]
Archives for January 2009
Barclays and RBS Share Prices Plunge
Barclays and RBS share prices fell by 25% and 17% respectively today; Barclays from £1.30 to £0.98 and RBS from £0.418 to £0.347. My wife indicated that the deeper plunge at Barclays was due to my departure from the group on Wednesday. She said that once the markets got hold of the news there was […]
Intel Profits Down 90% As PC Manufacturers Run Down Inventory
Intel’s fourth quarter profits took a hammering as their quarterly net income fell 90% from $2.014 billion to $0.234 billion. The credit crunch had driven revenue down from $10.217 billion to $8.2 billion. Intel decided to get all the bad news over at once this quarter with a $0.95 billion write off on their WiMax […]
Barclays Sheds Another 2100 Jobs (Including Mine)
In response to market conditions Barclays shed another 2100 jobs today The economic recession just got a bit more real for me, as my job was one of the ones to go as Barclays Global Investors reigned back their development activities in the UK. A couple of weeks ago I had been sure my job […]
Lousiest Christmas Ever On Most UK High Streets
The British Retail Consortium’s recent survey revealed Christmas 2008 as the worst Christmas ever with a fall of 3.3% in like for like sales and 1.4% in total sales compared to 2007. See the full report. However, there were a few notes of encouragement in some sectors: internet sales were 30% up on last year […]