We're paying for bankers' mistakes
Filed under: Financial Crisis, Mortgages
Retail banking and small business customers are still being made to pay for the mistakes made by traders and investment bankers during the financial crisis.A City analyst has crunched the numbers and worked out that losses racked up in investment banking at Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group over the last 2 1/2 years were five times those in retail banking. But guess who is paying for the investment banking losses?
More than four in 10 Britons feel worse off now than they did this time last year, according to new research from price comparison website Gocompare.
The financial crisis is far from over, Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned today. In fact, we have moved into a second stage: from the banking crisis that triggered the credit crunch (and a painful recession) to a sovereign debt crisis.
The end of the recession was supposed to be much more fun than this. The downturn brought doom and gloom to so many of us that we looked forward to the end of the recession as the opportunity to breathe easily again. However, in reality things have never been so gloomy.
The credit crunch wouldn't have been nearly as bad if there were more women working in the City, according to a report from a cross-party group of MPs.
Good news for bankers. Oh good.
The pound has perked up a bit lately but there is no escaping the fact that going abroad has become much more expensive in the last couple of years.
It has been another grim year for the world economy, but 2009 could have been a lot worse than it was. 
After the global economy suffered another bad year and recovery looks to be slow and protracted, we look back at some of the lighter moments of 2009.
The most memorable moment in the chancellor's pre-budget report speech today was perhaps the reduction in bingo tax from 22% to 20%, which got a lot of laughs in the Commons.
When Tesco announced its results yesterday, Sir Terry Leahy took the opportunity to wax lyrical about the recovery - which he seems to think is just around the corner. His evidence lay in the fact people were shopping more at Tesco, and that non-food lines and posh lines were increasing.
Iceland has been in dire straights for a while. In the glory days, Icelandic entrepreneurs went on shopping sprees, buying up the likes of Hamleys and Karen Millen. And the Icelandic banks pushed into the UK consumer market.
There are a few phrases we are all thoroughly bored of: the recession, the credit crunch, the downturn, the financial crisis.... yawn yawn yawn.
