The blame game - This is Money podcast

This is Money Podcast

This is Money

Business, Investing, Business News, News

4.4 • 735 Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2016

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Share prices around the world this week have been falling like dominoes in a record-breaking dominoes falling over attempt.

London loses 2% in a day, New York opens and falls 2% then in Asia the sell-off continues, slashing 2% off its market value. London opens again and mirrors the previous losing sessions in Asia and the USA and so it goes on. And on.

The FTSE 100 index of leading UK shares found itself at a three and a half year low.

But why?

Central bankers whose job is supposed to be to prevent this kind of mess know how to talk the talk but there is growing evidence that they don’t really know how to work the bank.

Their policies of handing taxpayer money to bankers - rather than prison sentences - and of cutting interest rates to less than nothing have left them stuck in a hole without room to manoeuvre.

Jobbing bankers lost any credibility in the last crisis. But without punishment or a conscience could they be to blame again this time?

Or is it simply that traders aren’t human any more but mere automated algorithms that react to preprogramed instructions? Computer says sell.

This is Money editor Simon Lambert, consumer affairs editor Rachel Rickard Straus and Share Radio money guru Georgie Frost try to work out where the blame lies.

Also in the show.

Apart from the free money and long-term benefits, what’s the point of a pension?

Why do our privatised, apparently competitive energy companies raise and drop their prices by pretty much exactly the same amount?

Why won’t idiot bankers lend to safe-as-houses people with secure incomes just because of their age?

What’s so great about Hatton Garden – the jewellery capital in the capital?

And what if…

Crumbling share prices are nothing to worry about at all – just a great excuse to start investing?

Email us hello@dmgmedia.co.uk

Text us 020 7938 6000.

Hosts: Georgie Frost, Simon Lambert, Lee Boyce, Helen Crane

Producer: Georgie Frost

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Money, brought to you in partnership with NS&I.
0:34.3	I'm Georgie Frost here with you on DAB online and through the Share Radio mobile app every
0:38.9	weekday from 9 until midday sharing ideas about money. I'm joined in the studio by editor Simon
0:44.2	Lambert and personal finance editor Rachel Rickard Strauss from the award-winning This Is Money to talk
0:49.4	through some of the stories on their website that they've been investigating over the last
0:53.1	seven days. And on the agenda
0:54.9	today, well, what a last seven days it has been. What a week for global stock markets. Are we on
1:00.1	the brink of a new crisis? The market seemed to have disconnected from the economic reality in some
1:05.8	ways. If you look at the US economy, it did grow 2.4% last year. To markets in turmoil, the footsie had a three and a half year low mining firms hit
1:13.5	and billions wiped off the value of the biggest banks.
1:16.5	But while some take a step back, others see the turbulence as an opportunity.
1:21.2	And Simon's been talking to just them.
1:23.3	In between doling out pensions advice to his baby sister. What are those pearls of wisdom?
1:28.3	We'll find out a little bit later on. Meanwhile, has market turmoil wreaked your pension drawdown
1:33.0	plan? The team will let us know how to rescue your fund from devastating early losses.
1:38.1	Also today bringing up the rear, the final two of the big six energy firms join the party
1:42.8	and cut gas prices by a pretty similar figure
1:46.2	to all the others. One of them sets the lead and then the other ones follow. There are smaller players
1:51.9	and that's where the better value is an offer and that's where we should be looking if we want
1:55.5	to get the best deals. We take a look at the latest smishing menace doing the rounds and ask,
2:02.8	are mortgage lenders aged?
2:10.7	We've got an ageing population and people now wanting to or needing to access housing wealth in ways that they haven't really needed to before.
	...

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