Articles About United Kingdom

Wobbly economies that shook up markets in 2011 took their toll on the world’s rich, though fast-growing Asia for the first time had more millionaires than North America.  According to the report, the global personal wealth of people worth $1 million declined in 2011 for the second time in four years, a side effect of […]

The American economy grew less than expected during the 1st quarter as the biggest gain in consumer spending in more than a year failed to overcome a diminished contribution from business inventories.  Gross domestic product rose at a 2.2 percent annual rate after a three percent increase in the 4th quarter of 2011, according to […]

Europe’s financial woes have spread across the English Channel as the United Kingdom slid into its first double-dip recession since the 1970s. Britain’s GDP fell 0.2 percent from the 4th quarter of 2011, when it declined 0.3 percent, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). As anti-austerity backlash grows on the Continent, Prime Minister […]

The United States’ 2010 GDP soared at an annualized rate of 3.2 percent, as consumer spending rose by the greatest levels in four years.   “The consumer really drove the economy in the 4th quarter,” said Guy LeBas, chief fixed-income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia.  “The economy has moved beyond recovery to a […]

Jon Levy is a European Union analyst with Eurasia Group and a frequent commentator on European issues, appearing on CNN, CNBC and NPR.  He was previously director of national security policy for John Kerry’s presidential campaign.  In a recent interview for the Alter NOW podcasts, Levy discussed several factors shaping European real estate markets – […]

London has overtaken Washington, D.C., as the preferred city for commercial real estate investment,  primarily because investors believe that prices have bottomed out and the time to get into that market is now. The British capital has overtaken the previous favorites of Washington, D.C., and New York, according to a survey conducted by the Association […]

Apparently, the American housing market is not the only one experiencing difficulties.  In the United Kingdom, Lloyds Banking Group Plc has sold its unprofitable chain of 218 Halifax Estate Agencies, Ltd., a large British residential real estate brokerage firm, to LSL Property Services Plc for just £1 – about $1.60. According to Lloyds, the sale […]

To purge their balance sheets of debt and avoid future writedowns, more and more U.K. banks are considering plans to transfer commercial property loans into REITs. Such strategies entail using REITs as publicly traded “exit vehicles” to limit the losses they and their borrowers face. The British Property Federation is currently pushing the idea to […]

Slowly advancing first-quarter sales may not make this the right time to pop the champagne corks-though it does represent a plateau compared with the previous quarter and suggests that the bottom may be in sight.  This update comes from Real Capital Analytics (RCA), which warns that “there is no recovery in sight”. In its June […]