UK taxes should be central to debate on paying for pandemic, suggests Richard Murphy

Joseph Stiglitz attacks Donald Trump, saying US on course for second Great Depression

Coronavirus lockdown causes fashion prices to decline for only second time since 1988

Business chiefs expect lengthy period before recovery as CDC chief warns of worse to come during US winter

Number of firms using job retention scheme rising with more mulling access, according to British Chamber of Commerce

Reluctance to visit reopened stores may prove trial run for rest of world after pandemicChina is giving away billions of yuan in shopping vouchers and offering other financial sweeteners to coax shellshocked consumers to start spending again.Although the country’s shopping malls and restaurants have largely reopened their former customers are proving reluctant to return as they worry about both their physical and economic health, against a backdrop of rising unemployment. Continue reading...

Producers forced to pay buyers to take barrels off their hands due to oversupply of crude amid coronavirus crisis

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as Covid-19 recession drives US crude oil into negative territory

According to one analysis, 5 million more Britons could be jobless by the end of May due to coronavirus

Issue would be easiest, fastest and least costly way to establish fund needed to rebuild more than just members’ economies

Meanwhile, chancellor’s Future Fund loans package is a welcome intervention

Plea follows Michael Gove saying pubs will be among last businesses to exit lockdown

Fears that system would be overwhelmed seem unfounded as launch goes smoothly

Rolling live coverage of business, economics and financial markets as British economic prospects slump

Perceived job security at lowest level ever in IHS Markit survey amid coronavirus crisis

Taxpayer-backed loans aimed at protecting innovative tech and life science firms

UK consumers could take £43bn hit as coronavirus crisis ravages UK economy

UK and Europe face growing inequality with layoffs hitting non-university educated

Freeze on transactions will cut sales by 38% with wide-ranging knock-on effects for economy, warns leading agencyMore than 520,000 UK home sales will be abandoned this year, after the government ordered a temporary freeze on the housing market last month because of the coronavirus outbreak, research shows.The property consultancy Knight Frank said the 38% drop in the number of house sales in 2020 would have a ripple effect across the property industry, hitting retailers, removal companies and even government coffers. Continue reading...

Internationalism is weak, diluted by the Covid-19 pandemic and the fight for hegemony between China and the USThe International Monetary Fund was eerily quiet this week. Normally, the IMF’s two buildings in Washington DC would have been full of finance ministers and central bank governors gathered together to discuss the state of the global economy. This year, the meeting was a virtual yet still an important one: the most significant since the financial crisis.Piecing together the story of the spring meetings of the IMF is a bit like peeling the skin off an onion, with the health emergency caused by the Covid-19 pandemic the outer layer. Since it was created at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, the IMF has seen many crises, but nothing like this one. Never before has it needed advice from epidemiologists to do the predictions for its flagship publication: the World Economic Outlook.Related: Will coronavirus shock the global economy into long-term thinking?| Larry Elliott Continue reading...

With most Gatwick flights grounded and a looming economic downturn, residents of West Sussex town fear for their jobs

After the war, a new, more just social consensus emerged. The same must happen now‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” So it seems with the economy. The world economy was slowing down before the onset of the virus, with many analysts forecasting a recession. The British economy was being held back not only by the repercussions of that, but also by the impact on business confidence in general and investment in particular of the mere prospect of Brexit.Then came the classic Yes Minister compromise: we officially left the European Union on 31 January, but we had a stay of execution – remaining in it for another year, but forfeiting, in yet another act of needless self harm, the right to have any say in its governance.This latest development is not so much an economic crisis as the result of a deliberate, if reluctant, act of government Continue reading...

Even faced with another great depression, wealthier EU countries are resisting action on debt that could ultimately keep the union togetherEurope’s leaders are worried – and rightly so. The deadly impact of Covid-19 has resulted in a full-scale health crisis. Evidence of the economic consequences of trying to keep populations safe from coronavirus is starting to emerge. The political ramifications are only starting to be assessed – but they could be profound.The European Union has found itself in some tight spots over the years, but always found a way of muddling through. It survived the financial crisis and will cope with Brexit. But this time things are a lot more serious. Continue reading...

Many Republicans believe economic relief for those without jobs encourages slacking off. But it is corporations that are bailed out again and againThe coronavirus relief enacted by Congress is barely reaching Americans in need.This week, checks of up to $1,200 are being delivered through direct-deposit filings with the Internal Revenue Service. But low-income people who have not directly deposited their taxes won’t get them for weeks or months. Worse yet, the US treasury is allowing banks to seize payments to satisfy outstanding debts.Related: Ignore the bankers – the Trump economy is not worth more coronavirus deaths | Robert ReichRobert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a columnist for Guardian US Continue reading...

Big businesses and governments are fast making themselves inviolable. There could be a backlashA global wave of injustice could follow the global pandemic. Pre-existing tendencies towards monopoly, Chinese dominance and predatory capitalism will explode unless governments take measures to contain them. I accept that it is hard to imagine public fury at a rigged economy when voters are rallying to their leaders and lockdowns are enjoying overwhelming support. Solidarity cannot last, however, as the crisis accentuates the division between insiders and outsiders.You see them now. Employees with staff jobs, and the ability to work from home, are coping, for the moment. A few might experience lockdown as something close to a holiday and rhapsodise on the joys of home baking and box sets. As insiders stay inside, they save the money they would have spent in shops, restaurants, hotels and travel agents - the places where the insecure, the luckless nine out of 10 in the bottom half of earners who cannot work from home, once made their livings.Complaints about tax-exile billionaires wanting other people’s money are a warning Continue reading...

Even before coronavirus, today’s Conservatives had a far worse record than the infamous governments of the 1970s. And yet they’re still likely to win another election

Measures to combat Covid-19 may include face masks on transport, physical distancing in offices and sport without spectators

Chancellor moves swiftly to protect jobs after coronavirus lockdown extended by three weeks

Governor Andrew Bailey says ‘livelihoods are at stake’ as figures show only £1.1bn lent to small firms

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as investors hope that a drug developed by American firm Gilead Sciences could treat Covid-19

Economic effects of lockdowns felt globally as depressed demand affects manufacturers

No, federal government spending doesn’t have to be ‘paid for’. The crisis shows providing for our society is not a financial issueOnly a month ago, a stimulus bill of $2tn would have been unthinkable. Indignant deficit scolds would have asked how one planned to pay for it, and complained about burdening our grandchildren with debt and bankrupting our country. Bernie Sanders bent over backwards to explain how he was going to pay for a Green New Deal or Medicare for All. These programs don’t seem as expensive any more. Suddenly the government is planning “helicopter drops” of cash. Larry Kudlow, who relentlessly attacked the Obama stimulus during the global financial crisis, is touting the current stimulus as “the single largest Main Street assistance program in the history of the United States”.Related: Not even Wall Street titans know the true cost of the coronavirus crisisOnce this crisis passes, the deficit scolds will be back at it, trying to put roadblocks in front of progressive policiesRelated: How coronavirus almost brought down the global financial system | Adam ToozeYeva Nersisyan is associate professor of economics at Franklin and Marshall CollegeL Randall Wray, author of Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems; Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist; and Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability, is senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute and professor of economics at Bard College Continue reading...

Banks offering loans will work through weekend so that scheme is ready for Monday

Activists say inclusion of oil firms’ debts in bond scheme breaks new governor’s promisesThe Bank of England has been accused of failing to live up to its tough talk on the climate crisis after it revealed it would buy debt from oil companies as part of its coronavirus stimulus programme.The oil firms BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total are among the companies whose subsidiaries’ debts are eligible for the Bank’s bond purchases, according to an indicative list published on its website this week.Income subsidies Continue reading...

More than twenty million unemployment claims have been filed in the last month across America

International community can avoid large-scale humanitarian tragedy in vulnerable regionsDeclining coronavirus infection rates and plans to begin easing lockdown measures in some parts of the developed world have provided a ray of hope after weeks of unrelenting gloom. But, for many developing countries, the crisis may barely have begun, and the human toll of a major Covid-19 outbreak would be orders of magnitude larger than in any advanced economy. With the US having recently recorded more than 2,000 deaths in a single day, this is no trivial number. If the international community doesn’t act now, the results could be catastrophic.Sub-Saharan Africa is a case in point. Several countries there would face significant challenges in enforcing physical-distancing rules and other measures to flatten the contagion curve. The region’s already weak healthcare systems could thus quickly become overwhelmed by an outbreak, especially in a high-density area.Related: Donald Trump is wrong, the economic hit of the coronavirus will last for years Continue reading...

Fund says countries are right to boost spending but should ‘keep receipts’ to ensure transparency

A dig into the data on the business interruption loan scheme unearths several areas of concern

The state has had to pump in money to prop up a system in which too many people were hanging on by their fingertips

America’s manufacturers and retailers are hit hard by coronavirus shutdown, as retail sales also suffer record slump

Jeremy Cushing, Dr Michael Griffiths and Ian Watson sound warnings over a thinktank’s call to ditch the triple lock on pensions, but Mike Pender is in favour of it. Meanwhile, Malcolm Pugh says raising tax on unearned income makes more sense

Hospitality and construction also dealt heavy blow by pandemic, says OBR

The role of the digital revolutionaries is to disrupt everything but the central institution of modern life: the market

Officially 472,000 people in the state filed for unemployment – but the true number is much higher due to the failing system

Work and pensions secretary stirs up interviewer incredulity in show of slim grasp of – mostly everythingImagine you’re a cabinet minister and you get a late-night call from the communications team at No 10 telling you that you’ve drawn the short straw for the following morning’s media round. Most would mutter “oh shit” and reconcile themselves to a night without sleep as they try to come up with some vaguely convincing answers to possible questions about the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Some might even have switched on the news and realised that deaths in care homes had become a hot topic.Not Thérèse Coffey. She just mumbles a simple “sure thing” and settles down to a good night’s sleep, certain she can wing her way through any interview. Seldom has confidence been so badly misplaced. Last week in her only previous outing, the secretary of state for work and pensions managed to underestimate the number of people claiming universal credit by 200,000. Now she was planning on going full Priti Patel in her desire never to be asked to make another public appearance. Continue reading...

JP Morgan’s $8.3bn bad loan provision is steep but it’s guesswork – no one has a clue about the final billAn $8.3bn provision for bad loans is steep, even for JP Morgan Chase, the biggest bank in the US. Is it even roughly the correct number, though?Jamie Dimon, unrivalled titan of Wall Street, didn’t quite shrug his shoulders nor did he indulge his normal habit of assessing the state of the world for lesser mortals. The provision was taken because of “the likelihood of a fairly severe recession”, which is stating the obvious, but then his finance director said the reserves “could be meaningfully higher in aggregate over the next several quarters relative to what we took in the first quarter”.Related: JP Morgan sets aside $8.3bn to cover Covid-19 lossesRelated: Banks paid millions in bonuses weeks before ban on cash rewards Continue reading...

Unemployment could hit 10% by end of spring with public borrowing rising at fastest rate since WWII

UK hospital deaths rise by 778 to 12,107 amid questions over care home figures; forecast says unemployment could soar by 2 million

UK chancellor says way to bounce back from coronavirus crisis is to reboot growth across regions