Word: britain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Pacific Investment Management Co., based in Newport Beach, Calif., and manager of the world's biggest bond mutual fund, is warning investors that Britain's stratospheric debt load is resting on a bed of uncertainty comparable to "nitroglycerin." If Britain is receiving such harsh criticism from money managers, can the U.S. be far behind...
...insurer, to buy the Asian operations of AIG for an eye-popping $35 billion. Much of that would be paid in cash, Prudential said, which would mean swapping huge piles of sterling for dollars. Toss in the relentless pressure from speculators betting on a falling pound, as well as Britain's generally horrible fiscal position, and "sterling has sailed into a perfect storm of negativity," Nick Beecroft, a senior foreign exchange consultant at Saxo Bank, wrote in a research note earlier this week...
...good news for Britain's pound: nasty fronts like this are usually rare, and soon pass. For one, the slide likely had more to do with Prudential's announcement than with intensified concerns about hung parliaments, as was reported widely in the British press, says Daragh Maher, deputy head of global foreign exchange strategy at Credit Agricole in London. In some ways, that's encouraging. If a single opinion poll was able to trigger the kind of slump seen Monday - in a volatile day of trading, sterling eventually closed 1.7% down on the dollar - an actual hung parliament might...
...that's not to say a hung Parliament itself wouldn't hit the pound hard. Long viewed as almost certain winners of an election expected in May, the Conservatives have squandered their double-digit lead in recent weeks. In fact, in a YouGov poll published in Britain's Sunday Times on Feb. 28, the Tories' margin over the governing Labour Party had diminished to just two percentage points, raising the specter of no party winning absolute control of Parliament. The problem: Britain has had little practice at coalition government in recent years. Its last attempt - more than 30 years...
...nerves are based on the idea that a clear election winner would create the best conditions for tackling that treacherous shortfall. While it's a reasonable assumption, it's hardly foolproof. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has little credibility left when it comes to the economy following his stint as Britain's free-spending Finance Minister in the decade leading up to the financial crisis. And although the Conservatives have pledged immediate cuts to the deficit should they win, they're still light on detail. (See a Q&A with Gordon Brown...