How's the US economy doing ? What new schemes have been proposed to help?

The British government has agreed a scheme whereby anyone who is unable to pay their mortgage because of losing their job or a decline in income may defer the interest payments on their mortgage.It applies to loans up to £400,000 (currently only $593,000 : don't all laugh! It was about $800,000). They may defer for up to two years.The unpaid interest is added to their mortgage.If, nonetheless, the property is repossessed the government pays the outstanding interest to the lender.

The other news is that the Bank of England has set the bank rate at 2%.That's the lowest it's been since 1951.Economists say that it will go even lower, in which case it'll be the lowest in the history of the Bank. The Bank was founded in 1694.

Nobody has a plan to bail out the British car makers. (We haven't got any ).

Don't tell me Morgan has gone!

The U.S. Federal Reserve cut its key rate to 1 percent last month. Japan has had some kind of 0% interest rate for some time, I think.

Morgan? [After posting, I was expecting that answer ] The post should really have read 'the British car makers' not 'the British..'.Morgan still flourishes. The 'production line' consists of their making a chassis, putting wheels on, and rolling it around the works, stopping to put on the other bits as they go.They have , I think, stopped making cars with an ash wood chassis now but they were still doing so well into the '70s.

Another is Bristol.They have no dealerships, no agents, and just one showroom.That is in a very posh part of London.That fits. The cars have very understated luxury and high performance . Just the thing for the British buyer: nothing, um, flash. Nobody seems to know how many cars they make per year (including them,I shouldn't wonder!).Buying from them is rather like having a tailor.You get top quality but it's not the done thing to say who your tailor is and he, in return, leaves no label visible, lest someone sees it in the coat

The last of the British makers was Rover.They finished in 2005.

'...We are already, however, well into the realm of what I call depression economics. By that I mean a state of affairs like that of the 1930s in which the usual tools of economic policy — above all, the Federal Reserve’s ability to pump up the economy by cutting interest rates — have lost all traction...' Depression Economics Returns

Krugman points out that 'the effective federal funds rate (as opposed to the official target, which for technical reasons has become meaningless) has averaged less than 0.3 percent in recent days'.

Talking of cars, one employer has a shocking device. BMW has just made over 500 workers 'redundant' in reality sacked them or 'laid them off', it doesn't matter what it's called, on one hour's notice. How could they do this, out of the blue? Easy.They used an agency. It's the agency that is, in law, the employer of these people. So all BMW has to do is terminate its contract with the agency, the agency workers are out of work and they have no redress whatsoever. Now, that's what I call an abuse!

And we have a new record for job applications. One of our police forces had a vacancy for one controller in their radio/ telephone section. It's received over 600 applications for the one job.

Takes me back to the old days, as reported. Back in the 1930s my father opened a new garage in Cambridge, a city which had comparatively low unemployment even then. He had one job for a petrol pump attendant, which he advertised for one night in the local evening paper. When he arrived next morning he found over 80 men waiting for that one lowly job. It wasn't just the number he found so startling, but that the men applying were desperate and extremely highly skilled engineers and machine operators and the like.Many were old enough to be his own father (who'd died when he was 13), for he himself was not just self-made from nothing but barely twenty -one. He thought that the most moving part of the whole picture, that the world could be so cruel to them, honest, skilled, family men who'd worked all their lives, and so kind to him, who'd been born with an eye to business and been given the engineering skills to exploit it. In the end he took two, and set one to work on machines at the back.If he could make a living in a depression, as he already had, he knew he could get enough new business to employ the second fully (and so it proved).

He never forgot that, to his dying day, as the most moving and saddening thing he ever saw in a lifetime in business.

Let's hope those days never return.

Those days are partially back.

I recently saw a job posting for a water company advertising a need for a meter reader. It was a Municipal job.

There were 900 applicants.

Some cheering news for a business. Britain's biggest pawnbrokers has announced an increase in profits of 120% against last year. That's still only about £500,000 spread over many pawnshops, but impressive nonetheless .