Your Castle And Your Business

OK, so you can no-logger say that an “Englishman’s home is his castle”. Even despite political correctness, it’s the news that 12% of small business owners have put their homes up as security to raise money last year, which means the idiom should actually be: “an English businessperson’s home is their collateral”? Not quite as catchy I know, but it’s an issue that is...

95 Million Reasons To Be Cheerful?

Last week we highlighted the fact that the schemes to increase lending to small businesses hasn’t worked, in fact we’ve had two years of falling lending. This week we hear that the government as part of the regional growth fund will make £95 million available to SMEs via the country’s largest banks. This “shot in the arm” won’t be in the form of debt, but actually will be given...

Two years of falling bank lending but we have reasons to be chearful

On Monday we had the FT reporting that mortgage an business lending falls further based on the latest figures from the Bank of England saying that “lending by all UK-resident banks and building societies indicated that the stock of lending to businesses contracted by around £2.5 billion in the three months to August” this is despite the figures from RBS that they lent £8.1bn to small business from July...

What’s Stopping You?

Given the self-destructive actions of Wayne Rooney, the possible lacks of judgement by Dr Liam Fox, Oliver Letwin, Tony Hayward and countless other high profile people in recent years, the comment by Dylan Evans when reviewing Robert Kelsey’s book What’s stopping you?: “Why do talented people sabotage their own chances of success? Often the answer is that they are afraid of failure“,...

Zero Progress From The Banks

With all the fluff from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills which stated that the “Project Merlin agreement recently struck with the major banks, we have secured £190bn of new credit in 2011, £76bn of which will be new lending capacity for SMEs”, we’ve actually seen small business lending halving, and in the Bank of England’s recent report we can see that “lenders...