Around 10 years ago, the housing market was undoubtedly Northern Ireland’s big economic story. Today, it is much further from the headlines but beneath the surface there has been a very significant economic tale unfolding.
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pensions
Chief Economist’s Weekly Brief – Bad habit
Just when you think it’s cooling, it comes back again. The housing market seems to be regaining a bit of momentum. But it’s not surprising. The UK won’t break its bad habit of not building enough houses. It would do the economy the world of good if it did. Continue reading
Today’s cost of saving crisis…tomorrow’s cost of living crisis?
In economics, we’ve become well accustomed to the word crisis over the past 10 years. We’ve had the banking crisis and the government debt crisis, to name a couple. Two years ago, we also became familiar with the oft-quoted ‘cost of living crisis’, when food and other prices were rising and wages were stagnant. Today, it could be said that we are in the era of the pension crisis, with the topic of provisioning for retirement very much to the fore. Indeed, earlier this month Baroness Altmann, the former UK pensions minister, said that pension funding had reached “crisis point” and blamed the Bank of England’s quantitative easing policy of buying bonds. Continue reading
