BELLA VISTA, Arkansas – For a man who has had his salary cut 10 percent and now has to work hard to make it to his next paycheck, Denny Robertson is in a philosophical frame of mind.

“I have had to learn to live with less. But I have shelter and I have food, so I have everything I need," he said. "It’s uncomfortable to run out of money before the next paycheck, but we’ll get by.

Robertson, 34, is a product engineer at tool maker Kennametal Inc. at a facility in nearby Rogers. Facing the longest and deepest recession since the 1930s, earlier this year the company laid off some staff locally and – in a bid to preserve jobs – gave others one week of furlough, or unpaid leave, every month.

After five months of that, however, the company gave salaried staff a 10 percent pay cut instead in order to keep the facility open at all times.

“If the economy shows signs of improvement then my salary will go back up,” Robertson said. “But I’m not holding my breath that the economy is improving and I’m not banking on it.”

“I keep hearing that the economy is recovering but I just don’t see it.”

Robertson and his wife Rebecca have two young daughters and have had to rethink their budget.

“We have picked up some good habits because of my situation,” he said, speaking at his home in this leafy small town in northwest Arkansas, which is just a few miles from the home of low-cost retail giant Walmart in Bentonville. “We eat out less and I have become more disciplined at making my own lunches for work rather than eating fast food every day.”

As a result, he has lost 20 pounds this year without any additional exercise. The Roberstons also now buys second-hand clothing and with the holidays coming up is planning to buy gifts only for children in their extended family – they will make cookies and other gifts themselves for the adults.

Robertson has stopped paying into his 401(k) retirement savings plan and the family now relies on credit cards only for emergencies.

“The credit cards are only for unexpected things,” he said. Recently his two daughters came down with the H1N1 virus and even with his healthcare coverage he had to charge co-payments and prescriptions to his credit card.

Robertson said that living with less has made him appreciate his church even more and he has raised his tithe payment to the church to 10 percent of his income.

“Even once my salary rises I’ll continue to do that,” he said. Another thing he said that will continue is that he intends to live within his means and not buy into America’s consumer culture any more.

He said that his church has members who are children of the Great Depression and this downturn has taught to appreciate what they went through growing up.

“In one way this recession may be a good thing for my generation,” Robertson said. “Perhaps this is what we need to build a little character.”

“We don’t have to have the latest TV to enjoy life,” he said. “Sure, I’d like to have that TV. But unless I can pay for it in cash, I’m not going to buy it.”

Photos by Lucy Nicholson

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BULLHEAD CITY, Arizona – Not so long ago this town on the Nevada border was in full boom mode.

It was a magnet for people coming to work in the casinos across the Colorado River in Laughlin, plus Californians looking to retire here or have a second home at a fraction of the cost in their own state. Construction workers flocked here to build homes and roads.

All told, successive booms turned Bullhead City from a fishing village just a few decades ago to being a city of more than 40,000 people.

But America’s housing crisis and the most severe downturn since the 1930s stopped the city’s boom dead in its tracks.

“We had booms in the 1980s and the 1990s, but in 2005 and 2006 things went absolutely nuts,” said John “Mac” McCollum. “Then in 2007 all of a sudden the lights went out.”

Many of the construction workers have gone, as have a lot of people who have been laid off at Laughlin’s casinos. Nevada’s casinos have had 20 consecutive months of declining gambling profits.

“Unemployment is on the rise and we’ve had quite a few foreclosures,” said Bullhead City Mayor Jack Hakim. “Families are leaving because there’s no work to be had.”

“It’s going to be tough for a while around here,” he added.

Unemployment in Mohave County where Bullhead City is located is around 10 percent. The median house price here has fallen from nearly $190,000 in January 2006 to less than $93,000 now, a drop of more than 50 percent.

Around 60 percent of McCollum’s sales now are foreclosures.

“Many of the other sales we handle are people trying to avoid foreclosure or at least break even,” he said. “Either way, right now foreclosures are pretty much the only game in town.”

John McCormick of McCormick Development helps run a number of family businesses – a water company, a construction company, a land development company and a real estate broker’s office – and says that many of the people walking away from homes here are either speculators or Californians who bought a second home here.

“If they end up in trouble, it’s so much easier to walk away from a second home than a primary residence,” he said.

The McCormick clan’s land development business has laid out a subdivision north of Bullhead City with 141 empty lots, complete with roads and water mains. But although there have been plenty of people looking, no one is buying right now. The family business owes the bank $8 million on the development, plus has to pay $160,000 annually in property taxes while the subdivision remains empty.

“There’s money out there but a lot of people won’t let it go,” McCormick said. “They just waiting to see if prices will go lower.”

For Bullhead City to come back, both McCormick and McCollum agree that casino business needs to pick up again but – even more importantly – California’s economy needs to recover.

“If California’s market is in the tank, we ‘re in the tank,” McCormick said. “I think we may be past the worst of it now. But nothing big is going to happen any time soon.”

When the Bank of England decided to expand its quantitative easing policy by 25 billion pounds to 200 billion on Thursday, it was essentially hedging its bets.

After Britain's economy shrank unexpectedly in the third quarter, and with two thirds of the City expecting an expansion to the QE programme, simply shutting off the tap of government bond purchases would risk being more of a shock than the economy could bear.

On the other hand, the Bank clearly believes that the worst is over for the economy and that recovery will come soon -- even if it's going to be weak.

Thursday's decision means the central bank will keep buying government debt until February, but at only half the pace of before. This still amounts to around 2 billion pounds a week, not including the much smaller sums of corporate debt that the Bank is buying.

What the decision means for a typical household is harder to calculate. The Bank says that its quantitative easing programme has raised the price of government and corporate
bonds, making borrowing cheaper.

But for average firms and consumers looking for a loan, the benefit is harder to spot.

There is little clear evidence that banks are much more willing to lend than a few months ago -- though the Bank would argue that quantitative easing has been instrumental in avoiding the recession turning into a depression.

In the longer term, the big unknown is the impact that quantitative easing will have on inflation. Sterling's weakness against the dollar and the euro will push inflation up in the short term, and going forward the Bank of England said it faced a balancing act.

While rising unemployment and half-full shops and factories will keep a lid on prices, policymakers know that quantitative easing could exert upward pressure on demand and prices for months if not years after it has stopped.

That's why they took the decision today which could mark the gradual phasing out of this unprecedented policy of asset purchases.

If you’re looking for ground zero in America’s longest and deepest recession, El Centro in southern California appears on first glance to fit the bill.

The unemployment rate here and for the whole of Imperial County hit 30.1 percent in September, the highest rate in the United States. Locals say there is no denying that El Centro has suffered as a result of the recession and that jobs are more scarce in an area where agriculture is the backbone of the community and forms 25 percent of the local economy.

“We’ve always had high unemployment, but nothing like this,” said Judith Klein-Pritchard, director of the Center for Family Solutions of Imperial Valley, which provides intervention for domestic violence and shelter services in the area.

However, officials like El Centro city manager Ruben Duran say the jobless numbers don’t tell the full story.

Duran points to the fact that back in March 2006 unemployment in Imperial County fell to 12.2 percent and the number of employed people in this county of around 160,000 totaled 54,057.

But when unemployment hit 30.1 percent – well over double the rate in March 2006 -- the number of employed workers slid less than 1 percent, to 53,734. City revenue from taxes is only down about 10 percent this year, Duran said, which also does not tally with the sharp rise in the jobless rate.

“Yes, there has been hardship and suffering here,” Duran said. “But where did all those extra unemployed people come from if the number of people in work has barely fallen?”

Tim Kelley, head of the Imperial Valley Development Corporation – a pubic private partnership set up to diversify the local economy -- said some of the rise in the unemployment rate comes from El Centro residents scattered about the country who have lost their jobs because of the recession and have come home to stay with relatives. Or that some of them are Mexican immigrants who have lost their jobs in the United States, have returned home and are claiming unemployment benefits in El Centro because it is a stone’s throw from the border.

“There are people who are working the system and that affects our unemployment figures,” Kelley said.

Drive around El Centro, a city of some 48,000, and it does not feel like some of America’s long-suffering communities like Flint, Michigan, where collapsing auto sales amid the recession have led to an unemployment rate of 15.8 percent. Whereas Flint is dealing with shuttered businesses and abandoned homes, relatively few stores have closed in El Centro.

Duran said the key to understanding the local economy and El Centro’s high jobless rate lies just across the border in the city of Mexicali, a city of more than 1 million people.

“The border bleeds both ways,” he said. “Many people who live here work in Mexicali. The trouble with the statistics is they stop at the border and don’t take into account the role a major city across the border plays in our economy.”

Photos by Lucy Nicholson

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Shadow Chancellor George Osborne will set out the Conservative Party's strategy for rebuilding the UK economy in an exclusive Thomson Reuters Newsmaker at 11 a.m. on Monday, October 26.

We will bring you full coverage of Osborne's speech, including a live video feed and blog, after which we will conduct a short social media interview with him.

We want you to send us your questions to put to him.

This is your chance to grill the man who, according to the latest opinion polls, looks set to inhabit Number 11 Downing Street after the upcoming general election.

Be it on bankers' bonuses, tax havens or the Conservative Party's plans for leading us out of a recession, send us your questions now using the form below or via Twitter using the hashtag #askosborne.

Companies need to actively encourage dissent and aspire to heretical rather than consensus views if they want to avoid being as unprepared as they were for the financial meltdown.

Noreena Hertz, professor of finance, sustainability and globalisation at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, kicked off the CFA Institute's second annual European Investment Conference in Frankfurt with a wake up call for the assembled asset managers and bankers.

"This was not just a financial crisis - this was an existential crisis that exposed a faultline in the system," she said. "The way we thought about the world was profoundly flawed."

Hertz identified several major problems - a culture of intellectual conformity, the deification of experts like Alan Greenspan, and dogma superceding reason. She said the free-market economics that triumphed post-1979 should have been treated more as a hypothesis, not fact, but within economics debate was discouraged, and thinkers like Keynes and Minsky who didn't fit the prevailing view were sidelined.

For their part, individuals and businesses had accepted orthodox thinking and allowed the proclamations of "experts" to go unchallenged. She urged delegates to think in a more holistic way - for example, rather than just focusing on rising house prices in the US, they should have given some consideration to the amount of credit cards the average household had.

Psychology also played a part. Investors had accepted Bernie Madoff's ability to deliver an 11 percent return year after year because they wanted to believe it. "In the same way, you need to ask yourself whether the "green shoots" recovery story is so dominant because everyone is bored with bad news. Is it a political construct in the hope that it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy?"

Having unsettled delegates, Hertz offered them some hope. Replacing the individualistic "Gucci capitalism" that has predominated for the last 30 years she foresaw a more co-operative capitalism in which individuals took a more active role in helping solve complex problems like climate change, the demographic timebomb and sustainability. Everything to play for there.

Britain's pound has long been the whipping boy of notoriously fickle currency markets, but there are worrying signs that it's not just hedge funds and speculators who have lost faith in sterling. Reuters FX columnist Neal Kimberley neatly illustrated yesterday just how poor sentiment toward sterling in the dealing rooms has become and the graphic below (on the sharp buildup of speculative 'short' positsions seen in U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data) shows how deeply that negative view has become entrenched.              

 While the pound's inexorable grind down to parity with the euro captures the popular headlines, the Bank of England's index of sterling against a trade-weighted basket of world currencies shows that weakness is pervasive. The index has lost more than a quarter of its value in little over two years -- by far the worst of the G4 (dollar, euro, sterling and yen) currencies over the financial crisis. The dollar's equivalent index has shed only about a third of the pound's losses since mid-2007, while the euro's has jumped about 10% and the yen's approximately 20% over that period.

There's no shortage of negatives -- Britain's deep recession, recent housing bust, near zero interest rates and money printing, soaring government budget deficit (forecast at more than 12% pf GDP next year, it's the highest of the G20) and looming general election in early 2010. In the relative world of currency traders, not all of these are necessarily bad for the pound -- the country is emerging tentatively from recession, the dominant financial services sector is recovering rapidly and  short-term interest rates (3-month Libor at least) do offer better returns than the dollar, yen, Swiss franc or Canadian dollar. 

But recent data from the IMF on global hard currency reserves shows there may be a more disturbing exit of central bank reserve managers from the pound (no stranger to process of losing reserve currency status, as its pole position was ceded to the dollar after WWI).  Sterling's share of the almost $7 trln of world central bank reserves -- which are rising sharply again after a brief hiatus due to the credit crunch -- is being steadily eroded. 

Although nominal reserve holdings of sterling (the rise of which prior to the crisis was seen as a powerful supporter of both the currency and gilt market) did rise by more than $10 bln in the second quarter, they remain about $24 billion below the peaks of Q2 2008. What's more, Citi economist Michael Saunders estimates that once you adjust for revaluation effects of currency rate swings, central bank holdings of sterling actually fell in Q2 this year.  He reckons that, accounting for these adjustments, Q2 was the second consecutive quarter of net sterling sales by central banks and that the 4 billion pound drop in nominal sterling holdings was the biggest on record. Saunders concludes:

The huge inflows of global FX reserves into sterling and gilts have played a big role in financing the fiscal deficit in recent years. At present, the fiscal deficit is being wholly funded by the BoE, but sterling remains vulnerable and gilts seem highly vulnerable as and when QE ends.

(Graphs by Scott Barber and IMF/Citi)

Could it be that equity and bond investors are living in the best of all worlds at the moment?

Tim Bond, head of global asset allocation at Barclays Capital, has hinted that they might be. He says that history shows current conditions to be the best for both assets.

 Since 1925, we find that in those years in which GDP was above trend and inflation below trend, U.S. equities have delivered an average 10.6 percent real return, with 20-year Treasuries delivering a 5.2 percent real return. 

But this is not the number one scenario for either.

This is the second best return regime of the business cycle, beaten only by those periods in which both growth and inflation are below trend, the condition that has applied so far
this year.

Specifically, the findings were as follows:

         Real annual returns, 1925-2008, U.S. assets
                                       Real annual returns Pct
                                                                             Equities Bonds Tbills

                Low GDP, Low CPI                                   11.4    10.1    2.8
                High GDP, Low CPI                                  10.6     5.2     1.3
                High GDP, High CPI                                  8.2     -1.2    -0.9           
                Low GDP, High CPI                                  -1.9     -5.0    -1.7

      The highs and lows are calculated based on trends over time with Bond estimating that current U.S. trend growth is about 2.3 percent and trend inflation 2.3 percent.

Reuters polls project the U.S. economy to contract by 2.6 percent annualised this year and to grow 2.2 percent in 2010. Inflation is seen at -0.5 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively.

In the wake of the worst credit crisis in generations, central bankers around the world are reevaluating the old-fashioned approach of leaving asset bubbles to their own devices and then mopping up the mess later. Many officials, including some at the Federal Reserve, are now contemplating a shift in approach.

William Dudley, president of the New York Fed, signaled as much at a conference this week. Answering audience questions at Fordham Law School, Dudley said there was a strong case for reassessing the hands-off attitude. But, echoing a long-standing central bank mantra, he argued that interest rates themselves are too blunt a tool for the job. Adding new policy instruments to the Fed’s arsenal might help (Dudley has previously mentioned regulation would do a better job than rates).

In that context, economists at Morgan Stanley see yesterday’s opening salvo in the global tightening cycle, marked by the Reserve Bank of Australia’s interest rate increase, as the start of a new trend:

“With the RBA the first G10 central bank to raise rates and a Norges Bank hike imminent, in our view, the monetary policy cycle has started turning. Both early hikers are moving while output is still below-trend and inflation below-target, in part because of concerns over house prices. This could herald a new era of central banks ‘leaning against the wind’.”   

BofA Merrill Lynch economist Ethan Harris isn’t buying what he calls ”extreme perma-bear stories” about the U.S. economy. A couple of weeks of disappointing U.S. economic data, culminating in Friday’s weak employment report , revived concerns that the economy was struggling to reach recession escape velocity.

In a research note, Harris said the bad news hasn’t changed his forecast for U.S. economic growth of 3 percent-plus over the next two years. He says the economy has a natural tendency to eventually return to full employment once the “negative shocks” are gone. He points to six major economic theories to support his view, including Keynesian, the Austrian school, and the “financial accelerator model,” which counts Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke among its advocates. 

But he acknowledges there is one well-known economic theory which does not support his forecast:

“The one notable exception to this view is Marxism. In Marxist theory the capitalist world is doomed to ever worsening cycles of boom and bust, culminating in its collapse and the assent of communism. Needless to say, we do not ascribe to this view.”