What credit crunch? £20m in bonuses paid....

05/06/09 -
News emerged this week that the FSA paid its staff near £20m in bonuses last month, a 40 per cent increase on last year’s payouts, according to figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats. The average bonus paid to regulator executives was £19,100, while the average for other staff was £4,107. A LD spokesperson commented that the size of some of these pay-outs would be hard to justify at the best of times, but it looks especially bad in the current economic climate.
Creditaction has reported that 33,600 applications for credit have been turned down every day during the past six months and that the Citizen Advice Bureaus have been dealing with 7,241 new debt problems every day.
The number of house purchase approvals in April hit 43,201, an increase on the March figure and the previous six-month average, according to the Bank of England. Although purchase approvals increased, the number of remortgage applications continued to decrease. This is somewhat surprising in current climates. With predictions of rates set to soar and current fixed rate mortgages so low, I’d have expected re-mortgaging to a long term fixed rate to be very attractive.
The Nationwide House Price Index suggests that house prices rose by 1.2% in May with the annual fall in house prices slowing significantly. Their latest figures show average house prices at £154,016, some 11.3% lower than this time last year but an improvement to the annual decline of 15% recorded in April.
However, let’s not jump up and down just yet! Every month, the variance in house prices is reported by numerous sources. So despite Nationwide suggesting house prices are on the up, there’s the probability that the Halifax and Land Registry reports may disagree. They all follow differing sampling measurements and more recently have rarely agreed. Some say that until these three align and consistently report that house prices are on the increase, for at least a quarter, the champagne needs to stay on ice.