This comes after the failure of the US Federal reserve to implement any real strategy last night, while announcing serious financial headwinds that could potentially put the world’s largest economy into recession.

While financial stocks have been the main losers so far, all sectors have been affected as markets price in the expected impact of eventual debt default across the Europe.

So far, Greece has been left with debts it cannot pay, and an austerity program that is not strong enough to satisfy the IMF and EU, who are hesitantly providing emergency loans while the Greek economy remains on life support.

However, with national strikes taking place across Greece today, it is clear that even those austerity programs actually being enacted are extremely unpopular and facing national revolt.

The fact that Greece will eventually default on its debts is inevitable, but EU leaders are concerned that other struggling economies: Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy, will all fall next.

An internal report within Morgan Stanley has suggested that while Spain should be able to survive any debt problems, Italy is already technically insolvent and is likely to fall to default eventually because it too cannot properly service its debts.

The whole issue brings to question the future of the euro. While Germany still remains Europe’s most stable and healthy economy, it too is falling back to recession.

As Europe moves to possible recession or protracted zero-style growth, the expectation remains that Europe will face its own Lehman-style crisis, caused by a double whammy of banking and sovereign debt failures.

Unlike US banks, which have come relatively clean on their losses, European banks have stubbornly tended to keep losses off their books for accounting purposes, resulting in EU leaders calling for greater capitalisation of Eurozone banks.

Overall, while markets have been very volatile these past weeks, all indications are that bullish investor sentiment is giving way to bearish fears that debt contagion is about to have a disastrous impact across European and world economies.

The expectation remains that the FTSE 100 is likely to fall over the coming months, likely reaching 4500 points before Christmas, and possible falling back to 3500 points around the New Year as the looming debt crisis slowly but surely unfolds.

This is not least because ultra-low interest rates have deferred the debt crisis, rather than addressed it.

The property market has become unbalanced, caused by excessive lending, and low interest rates.

Both of which have allowed for a surge in property prices over the past decade as people were able to buy in excess of their means.

The current state of the market, where First Time Buyers are excluded, is a symptom of how it has become unbalanced.

Left to itself, property prices will fall as part of a natural market correction, and as this happens, first time buyers will be able to establish themselves in the market again.

These things are fact.

Government and media suggestions that the problem is mortgage lending restrictions, as opposed to property price excess, simply fail to acknowledge these facts and seek to work against them.

Today’s coverage of Grant Shapps calling a meeting on how to address mortgage lending issues for First Time Buyers, falls into this trap.

Let’s be clear: recent years of mortgage lending has been extremely unbalanced, with 125% mortgages made available, and reports of mortgage advisors, even in large banks, helping people fake their income on mortgage applications in order to ensure success.

Coupled with low interest rates, borrowing huge amounts of money had never been so easy. Property prices jumped because of it.

So any suggestion of trying to move back to these previously damaging lending criteria is surely unhelpful.

Obviously, there’s a popular perception that rising property prices is healthy and enriching, and during normal market conditions following normal market trends, this would entirely be justified.

But property prices have risen far in excess of basic trends such as affordability by comparison with wages. It’s therefore natural that property has become less affordable.

It is therefore important that property prices be allowed to fall to sustainable trend levels so it can function healthily as a market.

Under Gordon Brown, the Bank of England specifically reported property price growth as something to be encouraged because it was seen as a healthy economic indicator.

Astonishingly, there were no real concerns of a property bubble, even though it was commonly observed from working class streets to IMF reports on global financial stability as being a concern and a problem.

No doubt political posturing is involved in being seen to talk about mortgage affordability, but it would be nice if we could address the reality: that property prices are too high, and stubbornly resist correction.

While some people may becry any apparent loss of property value as a loss of money, let’s be clear: it’s money that was never there realistically in the first place.

With Winter officially here, RAC have put together some answers and tips to the most common questions about maintaining your car and driving during the cold weather:

Q. How can I keep my cars’ battery in good condition for the winter?

It’s a good idea to purchase a good quality battery charger to keep it topped up – RAC have several suitable products that can be purchased easily from racshop.co.uk or local stockists and will keep your battery in good condition all year round.

Q. How can I prevent my washer bottle from freezing?

Use a suitable screenwash additive and top it up regularly. Also, keeping the vehicle in a garage will normally prevent it from freezing. If the washer bottle has already frozen, try pouring warm water in to help defrost it.

Q. If I use my wipers to clear snow and ice from the windscreen, will it damage them?

It’s advisable not to use the wipers to clear heavy snow and ice, as it may cause the fuse to blow. This is because the wipers may not be able to cope with the weight of the snow, or may be frozen to the glass.

Q. If my locks freeze, what should I do?

Lock de-icers are available, but if you don’t have any available, use warm water poured over the lock barrel area. Also, it’s worth gently working the key in and out of the lock a few times to help free it off.

Q. My handbrake sticks on in the winter, what should I do?

It’s possible that the handbrake has frozen on. Remove the rear wheel trims (if fitted) and carefully pour hot water all over the wheel nut area. This may take a few attempts, but should help free off the handbrake.

Q. What checks should I be doing on my vehicle for the winter?

There are several easy checks you can carry out yourself such as:

• Tyre pressures (including the spare)
• Tyre tread depths
• Oil, washer fluid and anti freeze / coolant levels
• Lights are all working correctly
• Check front and rear wiper blades for wear or splitting

Q. What should I do to avoid skidding in the snow or ice?

When you know the roads are icy or covered in snow, try to avoid any heavy braking and use the gears to slow down. Make sure you drive in the highest gear possible to help keep control of the vehicle.

Q. I know I can’t use boiling water to de-ice my windows, but what should I use?

If no de-icer is available, use warm, tepid water and try and clear the screen quickly to prevent refreezing.

Q. When should I use my front & rear fog lights?

Fog lights should only be used when visibility of the road ahead is less than 100 metres and switched off as soon as visibility improves.

Q. What should I be carrying in the car for a winter journey?

A must-have list for your winter car kit should include: a torch, blankets, wellies, an ice scraper, de-icer, battery jump leads and a first aid kit. These are all worth keeping in the car all the time, but especially in the winter. For long journeys, it’s always worth having a flask of warm drink just in case the worst happens and you get stuck or break down. Make sure you have plenty of fuel before you start out, in case you get stuck in traffic.

By carrying out a few basic checks motorists can potentially prevent a breakdown. RAC advises motorists to make the following checks:

• Check tyre pressure (spare tyre too!), tread depth, at least 3mm is advisable in winter conditions, and oil level
• Check all lights are working correctly and remember to keep them clean
• Check front and rear wiper blades for wear or splitting
• Screen wash additive should be added to prevent freezing

If there’s one thing the financial crisis has made crystal clear now, it’s that it’s time to let the banks fail.

There’s no longer any reason why the banking sector, which clearly dragged us into the biggest financial crisis for a century, should therefore be subsidised by the taxpayer in order to simply continue it’s high risk bonus leading culture.

Let’s echo the criticism from sour Americans when the first bail-out was announced: capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich.

This is entirely what the whole economic mess has become, and it’s time to tell the banks that enough is enough: if you cannot manage your balance sheet, faced being nationalised.

Of course, the first concern is to guarantee, in full, all of the deposits held in any bank. It is far far cheaper to guarantee tax payer money held in trust in banks than to guarantee their debt.

The second is to get rid of the notion that any bank can be too big to fail – it isn’t. If any such failure has knock on effects within the banking system, it is because it is the banking system that is specifically at fault.

All that is happening at present is that the banks are fobbing their own crises onto tax payers, and it is neither fair, nor acceptable, that this should continue.

Market forces dictate that where a business fails, it should be allowed to die. The mistake our governments are making now is exactly the same as Japan made in the 1990′s.

Instead of letting failures be failures, by taking on a banking crisis as a sovereign debt crisis, all that happens is that the nation entire becomes trapped in economic stagnation, in order to keep zombie banks running.

Let’s be clear, the nationalisation of banks who cannot remain liquid does not mean the collapse of the banking sector. There will be and always shall be a banking sector.

The question is whether normal everyday people should have their pensions cut, benefits slashed, taxes increased, savings diminished, and general standard of living deteriorate – simply in order to have the debts of the rich foisted onto themselves.

Let’s be utterly brutal: neither HBOS nor RBS deserve to be operational. Both banks have failed due to poor business decision making at the top. By the men who are even now drawing on their golden goodbyes and additional pay offs.

So long as the government had stepped in to guarantee deposits and that the banks would remain operational as nationalised interests, we would be dealing with a far smaller crisis.

This is not a call for socialist or Trotsky-ist principles: I’m a business owner, and I demand to see market interests operate freely in the business world.

So far the government of Britain has pushed a huge amount of money into subsidising banks and even the motoring industry, and businesses like mine see nothing of it.

Instead, business like mine suffer because it is tied to consumer markets who are also suffering – not because of a lack of cash availability, but because every ordinary tax payer is now expected to contribute more and receive less – simply to benefit the banks.

At present, the government of Ireland is facing a bail out because they tried the same method as everybody else, or turning over a local banking crisis into a sovereign debt crisis.

It’s time for this to stop.

Simply put, if a business is going to fail, then let it, and worry first about protecting the interests of consumers, the taxpayers.

The time of giving everything to the banks because of their bad decision making has to stop.

It’s time for taxpayers to reclaim their money, and zombie banks allowed to die.

Current suggestions in the media are that in this week’s overhaul of benefits, the long-term unemployed will be made to perform some form of manual labour.

Already objectors are rising up to protest: the Archbishop of Canterbury has already thrown his critical oar in.

However, let’s be clear, this is not a new concept – it’s already been running for the past 15 years in some form or other, and has not worked during this time either.

The Conservatives originally brought in “Project Work” in the mid-1990′s, importing an idea from the USA.

The idea was simple: once someone had been claiming the now equivalent of Job Seeker’s Allowance for more than 2 years, then they would be forced into 3 months of “support” and “work experience”.

This resulted in a mass waste of tax payer money into paying agencies to take on the unemployed, teach them to cold call with a CV, and then put them on some useless work program.

This commonly involved painting fences, clearing cemetaries, or similar activities that could hardly be claimed to be providing any form of real and useful work experience.

Then when Labour came into power they rejigged the system and called it “New Deal”.

The New Deal meaning useless work, OR get training.

The same flaws were retained, but then extended – training companies were provided with cash and incentivised to pass their new students.

The result was that people could be trained up in basic computing skills and similar, for example – but unlike normal education programs, students would be provided with the answers to the questions they failed on. And then presented with the same exam again to redo.

Therefore ensuring that pass rates at these training centres were exceptional, and the training centres earned fat fees.

I know the truth of all this because these were my own experiences as long-term unemployed through the late 1990′s.

And, to make it worse, where disadvantaged areas were identified and the residents offered extra employment opportunities, these rarely materialised.

I still remember being part of a group of people on such a scheme applying for a basic office job with the local council. Despite scoring top for everything, and finishing everything faster than anyone else, I was not even offered the sniff of a job with that council.

Instead, as usual, public money had been thrown away to give every impression of trying to get people into work.

And the continual problem was always that those who devised the schemes at the top hadn’t a clue about the realities on the ground. Living in a world of stats and figures, they could justify themselves on spend, without having to face up to the reality of the public purse being screwed by opportunism.

Will the new plans being suggested by Iain Duncan Smith really make for any kind of change?

Probably not.

While Labour will no doubt chase the easy argument of there being fewer jobs available anyway so the exercise as pointless – while trying to pretend they didn’t steer the UK economy into a clear boom and bust – chances are few will be clued up on the realities of the long term employed.

The first problem was the CSA – Child Support Agency.

While the Conservatives have correctly identified a key problem that it often pays to stay on benefits than work, especially for families, no comment has been made on separated families.

In my time on the dole I met so many men who claimed they could not work because the moment they claimed a wage, the CSA would immediately take their income away for child support.

So it would not be worth their while to take a job unless the wage was ridiculously high, otherwise they would have nothing to live on. At least their dole money was safe and their own.

The second problem was that the work schemes were never orientated towards achieving useful work goals. Clearing a cemetary of weeds is hardly skills training for office work, industrial production, or customer relations.

And training that provides students with the answers during the exam is hardly going to result in proficient and experienced workers.

The third big problem was stigma – once you were on the dole for a while, employers would not take you seriously. It didn’t matter what skills and training you did – the fact you’d been on the dole for so long meant that there was obviously something fundamentally wrong with you as a person.

So getting out became more difficult.

And, fundamentally, the biggest problem of all – was the politicians.

Politicians who dream up grand ideas, and civil servants who implement them, all without any great clue about the realities of life on the dole, the actual reasons for being unemployed.

And, perhaps even worse, thinking that throwing public money into the private sector offered any kind of opportunity for the people it was primarily meant to benefit.

Certainly agencies benefited – a whole string of new companies were formed simply to take government training grants to take unemployed people off the unemployed register for 3 months.

I’m sure the situation has changed over the past ten years, I’m sure some of the flaws have been ironed out, and that there is a better quality assurance in place, not least in terms of spending and training.

Certainly under Labour it become more self-employed friendly: my first business only lasted a short time, but at least New Deal gave me the opportunity to try it out. I learned some valuable lessons from that, and these were invaluable to growing and developing my second business – your reading one of it’s many publications.

And, my business card still carries a photo of myself wearing the same black Burton’s suit paid for by the Job Centre for interviews.

There’s no doubt the benefits system needs an overhaul to become simpler.

But politician’s also need to overhaul their thinking. They need to have a clear understanding of what happens on the ground when they set up any new program.

After all, while it no doubt creates some degree of public satisifaction to be seen to be tacking a problem, that’s no comfort if the reality is that the problem is just beeing smoothed over.

There have been forced work and training programs for the unemployed running for the past 15 years. The important issue now is for Iain Duncan Smith’s team to understand where and why this has not worked before, and where they have succeeded, and work from that.

And for god’s sake, talk to the long term unemployed and stop relying on easily manipulated statistics.

If they are serious about the problems of the long term unemployed, that is.

The recent furore of cuts to Housing Benefit is politically expedient, but I doubt many of the people clamouring against the cuts have ever seen the reality of the system.

The truth is that landlords have been shafting councils for Housing Benefit for decades.

And because the public sector has been forced to put so much taxpayer money into the market, it has artificially inflated rents for everyone.

Let’s be clear – there is going to be no mass exodus of “the poor” from cities across Britain.

The most likely reality is that landlords who leech the housing benefit system will be forced to cut rents.

Simple economics says that there can be no mass exodus from the cities of people on benefit unless there are people to replace them.

Judging by the numbers being imagined by Boris Johnson and co there are millions of hard-working families who are ready -and willing – to push their families into inner city housing estates at a moment’s notice. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the limits proposed are more than reasonable, and should force rents down not simply for those on Housing Benefit, but across the rental market. After all, taxpayer money into rents has skewed the market long enough as it is.

The hardest hit will not be the poor, but instead the rich.

The ones who buy a property, move a relative in, and then siphon off the Housing Benefit to pay the mortgage. Such as those who buy a Chelsea property for a son or daughter to study in London, all paid for by the tax payer. No longer.

There are great inequalities in the UK property market, from prices to rents, and the presence of massive public spending is always going to distort any market. It’s been left unleashed in Housing Benefit for too long.

While capping rents in itself is a fair ideal, in practice it would simply be a government attack to control markets, and that never works when done directly.

Controlling public spending into them, on the other hand, is a means to effect the same outcome.

I’ve spent time in my youth claiming Housing Benefit. I’ve seen the system from the inside, and thought it was corrupt and badly managed even then.

Now the time is more than due for it to be addressed.

Of course, no doubt some otherwise-deserving people will be adversely impacted by the changes. These major overhauls always do. But in the main, most people will see little difference.

Excepting, of course, the very landlords who have milked the system for so long, and suddenly find that they cannot.

Instead, all they’ve announced is one of the most sensible issues ever – cut a benefit to people who absolutely do not need it.

Let’s make it clear – the original purpose of child benefit was help raise child out of poverty. The reality now is that for many people, it’s just a tax break.

Underlined: benefits should be for those in need of financial assistance, not just everybody.

And David Cameron’s refusal to suggest people earning over £44,000 per year are rich shows the over-sensitivity to the issue. The fact is – if you are earning over £44,000 per year, then you are in the Top 60% of UK earners.

People on that income are not poor – you are rich. No one earning over £44,000 is in serious danger of poverty and neither are their children.

So why on earn are some people outraged that the government plans to cut benefit hand outs to the rich?

Even before our current Age of Austerity, child benefit has always been a stupid part of the welfare system. It should always have been scrapped. It is only now when budget cutbacks are necessitated that the waste is being culled from the system.

So why the supposed uproar?

Simply put, people don’t like having anything taken from them. That’s all this is about. And perfectly understandable, too.

But let’s be honest here – anyone about to lose child benefit by 2013 because they are earning over £44k was never in need of it anyway, it’s not going to hurt your wallet much, and really of of this is a load of whining for nothing.

Child benefit should be for the needy, not the rich.

Child benefit cuts? Bring them on, and everybody else: Get over it.

A £3m fund designed to help social enterprises expand has closed after making only one investment in two years.

Triodos, the bank operating the fund, said most social enterprises are not yet ready for large capital injections.

“The recession is having an impact,” said Charles Middleton, Triodos UK managing direction.

“But our experience was mainly not finding the number of social enterprises that were ready for, and had the appetite for, equity.”

Many social enterprise owners don’t want to take the risk of having large debts, he added.

“Entrepreneurs have to be comfortable with letting go that sense of control and ownership which is not easy to do and we have to respect that,” Middleton said.

Andrew Robinson, director of market development at social lender CCLA, said other lenders will fill the gap created by Triodos’s withdrawal.

“Triodos cancelled its product because the market it was trying to target was underdeveloped,” Robinson said.

“At the same time, other lenders are experimenting with new ways of bringing in risk capital to develop that fledgling market – and this is crucial.”

Has the FSA watchdog become mad and rabid just before being put down?

That’s the question a lot of IFA’s will be asking after the announcement today that the FSA will ban commission sales from 2012.

After sleeping through the financial crisis, and often taking token action in the event of breaches, the FSA is suddenly announcing a rush of policies in order to justify its existence – and the cost to the tax payer to run it.

It’s an open secret that commissions can skew impartiality – but competition within the financial services sector means that the difference in commissions paid doesn’t necessarily vary an awful lot.

So if you ask an IFA about the best insurance policy for a particular need, the IFA would gain a decent commission regardless of the choice made. The need to push individual products over others is limited.

And more important for the consumer – the advice would be free for them, paid for by commission.

By killing the ability to receive commissions, the FSA will force IFA’s to charge for their services – but why on earth would anyone want to pay for advice if they feel they can gain most if not all of that advice online and via comparison websites?

Comparison websites, which of course are funded through affiliate commissions paid to them for each resulting sale.

What the FSA does not seem to realise is that information has become abundant, and free, with the promulgation of the internet.

No doubt IFA’s have already been adversely impacted on simple products such as insurance, but where IFA’s especially come into their own is the ability to provide professional advice on more complex products – mortgages, pensions, and investments, for example.

For that, the expectation would be that IFA’s provide a valuable consumer service. And one that remains free for consumers.

The FSA may be concerned about mis-selling of PPI insurance and self-certified mortgages, but I’m sorry FSA – that happened on your watch, and you did little about it at the time.

As usually seems to happen with the FSA.

Recent demands from the FSA, such as the banning of self-certified mortgages, are not reasonable – they are a lifeline for self-employed people, as I can speak of from experience.

Yet mis-selling of self-cert mortgages within banks was well reported in the media a few years ago – but I struggle to find any reference to action the FSA may have taken about that.

And now a direct attack on IFA income seems unwarranted, uninvited, and ultimately, anything but helpful for consumers.

Here’s an outstanding thought for the FSA – if you are tasked with regulating a market, then regulate it. Don’t just take the easy option and try and kill it to make your job easier.

Most IFA’s are self-employed people or SME’s who work hard to provide a useful and valuable service – just because the FSA can’t be bothered to make a proper effort at doing it’s job, does not mean that it should try and damage other people’s abilities to do there’s.

Especially when they are already working under the existing harsh and limiting regulatory rules that the FSA is supposed to ensure are enforced in the first place.

Google Finance (http://www.google.com/finance) appears to be having problems today – with users being directed to a Chinese language version of the site.

Google Finance is certainly no stranger to problems – screwy updates, tickers, and sections of data missing – problems usually associated with the massive amount of data Google has to rely on.

However, the current issue with Google Finance appears to be a Google-specific error.

Much as we can appreciated the current bubble of economic attention on China, it doesn’t mean to say we need to have our financial data supplied in Chinese now. :)

UPDATE: March 11th – Looks like Google have managed to correct the bug at last. :)