You probably saw in my links that Fiat had bowed out because of German government demands. The Magna story also comes via the BBC:
Canadian car parts maker Magna International is the preferred bidder for GM Europe, owner of Opel and Vauxhall, Lord Mandelson has said.
The UK business secretary said a deal between Magna and GM [...]

Marshall Auerback here with some thoughts on the UK given the recent stellar performance of Sterling.
“The Conservative belief that there is some law of nature which prevents men from being employed, that it is ‘rash’ to employ men, and that it is financially ‘sound’ to maintain a tenth of the population in idleness for an [...]

Is the housing market in the U.K. bottoming?  Many pundits are talking as if it is and now we get the Nationwide data for May 2009 which shows a second rise in three months.  I am sceptical that we are at a bottom, so let’s see what the Halifax data say.
Fionnuala Earley has moved on.  [...]

On the face of it, Nationwide’s earnings report looks extremely good: 15% Tier 1 Capital, Pre-tax profit of nearly £400 million.  Given this financial institution’s leverage to the residential housing market, their results stand in stark contrast to the likes of Chelsea, which was downgraded by Fitch last week with four other U.K. building societies.  [...]

After a blip in the data last month, Nationwide is reporting that U.K. house prices have resumed their fall.  However, for the second month in a row, the annual price fall has slowed.  In March, the fall was 15.7%. This month we see only 15.0% compared to prices in April 2008.
Fionnuala Earley, the Nationwide’s Chief [...]

An increasing number of countries are recording negative year-on-year inflation numbers. I reported first on Spain, then on Switzerland.  Add the U.K. to the list as well.
Deflation returned to Britain for the first time in nearly five decades last month as prices measured by the retail price index (RPI) were lower than the [...]

House prices increased in March in the U.K. according to Nationwide Building Society. Below is what Nationwide’s Chief Economist Fionnuala Earley had to say about this surprise good news:
“Spring brought a surprise bounce to house prices in March. The price of a typical house increased for the first time since October 2007, rising by [...]

Dunfermline, the largest uilding society in Scotland was forced into the hands of the Nationwide.  This happened only after the U.K. government was forced to pony up 1.6 billion pounds – not the best of news for Gordon Brown before a major world summit.
As the Times Online says:
The state-backed rescue brings to six the number [...]

The FSA has been on the attack of late. First they warned bankers that heavy regulation was in the offing. Now they are directly accusing Gordon Brown, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and now Prime Minister, of aiding and abetting a bubble.

Back in December when the Bernard Madoff scandal first hit, I wrote a post, Madoff as a signal to go for “regulation heavy,” suggesting that Madoff was emblematic of a reckless period in the United States, symbolized by the lax oversight of the S.E.C. and the easy money of the Federal Reserve. While it can be debated what level of regulation is actually necessary to bring things back in order, I foresaw and still see a likely move to regulation-heavy in the U.S., if due purely to populist-political motives.

The same is very much true in the United Kingdom, where the move to regulation-light was instrumental in allowing the excesses that were manifest in Britain during the past decade-and-a-half. Now, the U.K. regulator, FSA has come out warning bankers to prepare for a brave new world.