Mortgage News
BoE must use QE to buy ‘bad mortgages’ – papers
Britain is in danger of creating a generation of “zombie households” that plunge the economy into a Japan-style lost decade unless policymakers take radical action to fix the banking system, a leading economic think tank has warned.
In a paper published today, Fathom Consulting says like Japan’s companies, many British households “are being kept afloat by near-zero interest rates, which can not last forever, at least not with a functioning economy”.
It urges the Treasury and the Bank of England to join forces and create a new “bad bank” to buy lenders’ worst mortgages in a bid to “unblock” the credit supply, the Telegraph reports.
Fathom said the purchases should be done through a second round of quantitative easing (QE).
“Put simply, [banks] have lent too much money against assets that have fallen in value, and those losses have to be fully recognised. Until they are, the economy will not be free to move forward,” Danny Gabay and Erik Britton argue in the paper.
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Private sector will suffer more job cuts than public – papers
The government’s spending cuts and the rise in VAT to 20% in January will result in more than 1.6 million job losses across the public and private sectors, research suggests.
“The figure from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is far higher than previous estimates, the BBC reports.
It said the full impact of the government’s Spending Review had been “understated”, and private sector jobs will be hit harder by the cuts than the public sector.
The government has estimated around 500,000 public sector jobs will go.