Rock fall was symptom of wider malaise

One year on from the collapse of Northern Rock, the fall out from the financial distress is proving to be much deeper and persistent than most people expected. The Financial Times is running a special series of articles on the Northern Rock twelve months on ... well worth dipping into especially for A2 students wanting to understand more about how the credit crunch has impacted on the UK. Here is Chris Giles from the FT:

“What seemed last September to be a nasty, but limited, financial crisis morphed into a global downturn that has repeatedly buffeted the economy with three interlinked hammer blows: a deep financial crisis in advanced economies on both sides of the Atlantic; a commodity boom squeezing real incomes; and a housing crash in those economies with the most precarious property markets. Britain is also having to deal with an exchange rate tumble as steep as that of 1992, when sterling was unceremoniously ejected from the European exchange rate mechanism.”

More here