An interesting post on ING's new eZonomics blog points the reader to a new study on older workers and health.  The findings -- as reported in The Lancet -- don't at first glance look terribly surprising:

A poor work environment and health complaints before retirement were associated with a steeper yearly increase in the prevalence of suboptimum health while still in work, and a greater retirement-related improvement; however, people with a combination of high occupational grade, low demands, and high satisfaction at work showed no such retirement-related improvement.

In simple terms, this is saying that if a worker is happy, their health is better. Anyone who has ever had a bad job could have told them that! But the study, of course takes it further.

Working life for older workers needs to be redesigned to achieve higher labour-market participation.

This has broad implications, given the trend away from final salary pensions and the general view that workers are going to have to work longer than in previous generations. Companies that are faced with workers who cannot easily retire because of a lack of pension savings, that need people to work longer  and that are subject to increasing anti-age discrimination will need to take the employment needs of older employees on board.

It may not be easy. As the ING post points out, the OECD looks at the issue in a 2006 report entitled "Live Longer, Work Longer". It began its report:

In an era of rapid population ageing, many employment and social policies, practices and attitudes that discourage work at an older age have passed their sell-by date and need to be overhauled. They not only deny older workers choice about when and how to retire but are costly for business, the economy and society.

Then comes the recommendations:

-- There must be strong financial incentives to carry on working and existing, subsidised pathways to early retirement have to be eliminated.
-- Wage-setting and employment practices must be adapted to ensure that employers have stronger incentives to hire and retain older workers.
-- Older workers must be given appropriate help and encouragement to improve their employability.
-- A major shift in attitudes to working at an older age will be required on the part of both employers and older workers themselves

Is any of this being done?

The title of this post is taken from two sources. One was a headline in British tabloid, The Sun, in January 1979, when then-prime minister James Callaghan denied that strike-torn Britain was in chaos. The second was the title of a 1975 album by prog rock band Supertramp that famously showed someone sunbathing amidst the grey awfulness of the declining industrial landscape.

Are we now getting blasé about the latest crisis? Not so long ago, perfectly respectable economists and financial analysts were talking about a new Great Depression. The world was on the brink, it was said. Now, though, consensus appears to be that it is all over bar the shouting. The world is safe.

Wealth managers at Barclays have gone as far as telling their clients to get over it.

Move past the crisis .... The past year's events were deeply traumatic for most investors, but now is the time to move on, and take a more "business as usual" approach ...."

Such bullishness may not be comforting to the record numbers of jobless in parts of the world, but it is bordering on consensus. It is left to the likes of perma-bears such as  Nouriel Roubini to try to burst the bubble of optimism on which many are floating. The economist began one of his latest articles bluntly:

Think the worst is over? Wrong.

Roubini's main point is that unemployment is likely to get worse rather than better and that many U.S. jobs that have been lost will not come back.

Now, there can obviously be a disconnect between markets and economics, but the former tends to be based on assumptions about the latter. So which is right? Are we out of the woods? Or should Supertramp be firing up their keyboards again?

Gordon Brown is truly having a rough time. Rebuffed by the United States, International Monetary Fund and others for floating the idea of a tax on financial transactions at this weekend's G20 meeting, he has now got short shrift from the Cayman Islands.

McKeeva Bush, the veteran Caymanian politican who is now premier of the British Overseas Territory, popped in to the Reuters London headquarters for a chat this week. His main concern was to explain plans for making the islands an easier place for financial services personnel to live in. He would like some of those 8,000 hedge nearly 10,000 funds that are registered there to be more than just brass plaques. But, when asked, he also had time to dismiss the idea of a transaction tax out of hand.

"That's an old hat. I have been hearing about it for 25 years. It's just not practicable. It will not work."

And just in case the point was missed:

"We have looked at it and we do not think this is something that would work."

Bush would not be drawn on the idea that a tax on transactions could, metaphorically speaking, sink his Caribbean island homeland under the waves. But Paul Byles, a government financial services consultant who accompanied the premier, did touch on the liquid nature of the issue:

"Tax flows, and they will move somewhere else."

MacroScope is pleased to post the following from guest blogger James Carrick.  Carrick is economist at UK fund firm Legal & General Investment Management. He says here old patterns of lending are unlikely to return and that this means slow growth in developed countries.

"Despite £175 billion of quantitative easing, bank lending in the UK remains weak, threatening to restrain the economic recovery and equity market rally. 

Policy makers in the developed world have been working overtime to encourage banks to lend at the ‘normal’ levels experienced during the past decade. However, these "normal" levels are no longer realistic. The factors which contributed to the secular rise in debt over the past decade are now reversing. Populations are ageing, interest rates can’t go any lower and sub-prime lending is over.

As a result, higher levels of savings (where consumers pay down debt) and lower spending will weigh on the pace of the recovery.

This is not to predict a double-dip recession. Instead we are probably in store for a more subdued period of growth next year as households can no longer borrow money they don’t have, and unemployment remains high.

On the flip-side, while consumers in the developed world are still suffering a hangover from the credit-crunch, the debt party in many emerging economies is still in full swing.

This suggests that companies with exposure to the developing world will fare better."

Britain’s railway franchises have been branded “a mess” by a group of MPs, who call for major reforms including the nationalisation of the troubled East Coast mainline.

The Transport Select Committee has called for the East Coast, set to be taken off the hands of current operator National Express later this year after the company complained of heavy losses, to be kept under state ownership and used to compare against the performances of private companies.

But why stop there?

The present system of privatised railways, with its split operation between infrastructure and train operating companies, has always been criticised by passengers’ groups as un unwieldy beast with a distinct preference for profit over performance.

The Transport Committee says the system actively encourages train operators to take their passengers for granted.

Would it be such a drastic step to take the whole system back under public control? After all, the government already effectively owns Network Rail, pouring billions of pounds a year into the tracks-and-stations company.

Is the time right to go back to the days of British Rail? Or would that just lumber the public purse with another colossally expensive enterprise which may turn out to be no more efficient than the present system?

MacroScope is pleased to post the following from guest blogger Julian Chillingworth. Chillingworth is chief investment officer of UK investor Rathbones. He questions here whether Britain will face a second downturn shortly after struggling out of recession.

Are we likely to witness a two-tier recession in the UK?  Perhaps not a recession but certainly a secondary downturn. A vast number of people have enjoyed lower mortgage payments and a level of job security, but will this last?

The UK is in somewhat of a unique position in so far as it faces a regime change, with some obvious ramifications for policy.  However, whoever takes the seat (most likely the Tories) must still cut back public expenditure and raise taxation, both within the context of high unemployment.

It will require the wisdom of Solomon as a further rise in unemployment hits tax-take and results in rising social security payments. Who would want to be George Osborne?!

Key will also be the state of the financial services industry, the banks – other G7 nations do not have the ‘core component’ element to deal with in this respect – and the consumer won’t be moved in any meaningful fashion until there is real evidence of stability there.

Economic news is improving, but in the near term sentiment will be led by the direction of earnings.

The bottom line is the US might be troughing out, but this time round, we in the UK could be on our own for a little while longer.

Britain's recession, like the downturns in most other places, is being hailed as either having reachえｄ bottom or tailed off in its decline. The latest to trumpet the beginning of the end is the British Chambers of Commerce, which said business orders and sales had continued to fall in the second quarter but at a slower pace than previously.

So does this mean that the Bank of England will soon start raising interest rates from the negligible 0.5 percent reached last year as policymakers sought to pump liquidity into a failing economy? Not according to researchers Capital Economics, which argues in a new report that market assumptions of higher rates at an early stage are misplaced. They offer three reasons:

-- A return to strong levels of activity and rapid price gains in the housing market is unlikely for some time, even at very low interest rates. Meanwhile, the overall economy is likely to expand at only sluggish rates in the foreseeable future. And even if the recovery continues to gather pace, the large amount of spare capacity - or slack - in the economy suggests that there should be no hurry to tighten policy at all.

-- Even when monetary policy is finally tightened, some part of this will involve the reversal of the Bank of England’s quantitative easing programme. Although the likely order of events is far from clear, this could delay the need for a conventional tightening in the form of higher interest rates.

-- Thirdly, there is good chance that monetary policy in general takes a back seat to a substantial tightening of fiscal policy as the government responds to the growing pressure to sort out the public finances. This is likely to take the form both of higher taxes and a severe squeeze on public spending and would require monetary policy to be kept correspondingly loose to prevent the economy from slipping back into recession.

So, essentially, the BoE will not be able to raise rates because a) the economy is a long way from good b) it has other things to unwind first and c) life is going to be so miserable for Britons that low interest rates will be their only salvation.

This latter point is beginning to excerise a lot of thought in Britain, with the head of the Audit Commission criticising politicans for failing to be honest about the need for cutbacks, given a forecasted £175 billion public deficit this year -- more than 12 percent ofgross domestic product.

"People had better understand this is an unprecedented situation. We have never seen anything like this in your lifetime or mine," Former prime Minister John Major, who knows quite a bit about crises, told TV presenter Andrew Marr.

(Reuters photos: Eddie Keogh and Darren Staples)

Has German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck finally said what many world leaders think but are afraid to say? That the British government won't sign up to meaningful reform of financial markets because it is too worried about what it would mean for the country’s most famous cash cow, the City of London.

The City, which accounts for around 35 percent of global foreign exchange turnover, has been a popular target for critics of capitalism for years. But it has rarely been singled out so bluntly as a problem by one of Britain’s close allies.

Even for a man not known for holding his tongue, Steinbrueck’s remark on Wednesday that Downing Street was impeding reform because it had “practically aligned” its interests with the City, was unusually undiplomatic. Just days before global leaders meet at a Group of Eight summit in Italy, Steinbrueck suggested the British government was plotting a “restoration” of the pre-crisis order to protect its own interests. The United States, by contrast, was now open to reform, he said.

Rather than attempting to smooth ruffled feathers when she addressed parliament on Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel picked up the thread, saying she would not tolerate efforts to stall reform at the G8 summit, though she did not name Britain.

Steinbrueck’s comments generated a strong response on German websites. Though he belongs to the centre-left Social Democrats, many readers of conservative daily Die Welt wrote in to praise him. “Finally the truth”, “genius” and “backbone” were some of the remarks his stance provoked. Across the channel, the most popular reader’s comment posted online in an article by Eurosceptic British newspaper the Daily Mail also backed the 62-year-old. “I’m with the German finance minister,” it begins.

Whether one agrees with his approach or not, Steinbrueck knows he is not talking into a vacuum. Large swathes of the commentariat believe not enough has been done to stabilise financial markets over the long term. Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, wrote on Wednesday that without radical changes, another banking crisis is inevitable.

PHOTO: German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck addresses a news conference in Berlin, May 13, 2009. Steinbrueck said on Wednesday Germany's interbank lending sector was still suffering from weak confidence. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

MacroScope is pleased to post the following from guest blogger Simon Ward. Simon is chief economist of Henderson Global Investors in London and previously worked for New Star Asset Management and Lombard Street Research. His own blog is Money Moves Markets.

UK house prices are no longer expensive relative to a measure of "fair value" based on rents. Prices fell significantly below fair value during the major house price busts in the 1970s and 1990s but a big undershoot is unlikely in the current downturn because low interest rates will limit forced selling.

The notion that housing is no longer overvalued is controversial because the house price to income ratio remains far above its average since 1965. This average, however, is unlikely to be a good guide to fair value because the ratio has trended higher over time, reflecting factors such as improving quality, the pressure of an expanding population on constrained supply and a high income elasticity of demand for housing.

An alternative approach is to use rents rather than income as the basis of comparison. Rents already incorporate fundamental influences on housing demand and supply. People need to live somewhere – the choice is between buying your own home or renting, not between spending money on housing or retaining income for other purposes.

An economy-wide rental yield can be calculated from national accounts data by dividing the sum of actual rental payments and imputed rents of owner-occupiers by the value of the housing stock. The yield averaged 3.6 percent between 1965 and 2007. This seems low but the measure includes subsidised social housing and takes account of vacant properties.

The housing boom pushed the rental yield down to 2.8 percent at the end of 2007, suggesting that prices were then overvalued by about 29 percent, based on the 3.6 percent long-run average. The Halifax index has fallen by 21 percent since December 2007, while rents had grown 6 percent by the fourth quarter of last year. These changes imply a current yield of about 3.8 percent, consistent with small undervaluation.

The rental yield rose well above the 3.6 percent long-run average during prior housing busts. If the overshoot in the current downturn were to equal the undershoot during the boom, the yield would rise to 4.4 percent. This would be consistent with a further fall in prices of about 14 percent, assuming unchanged rents. A decline of this order is widely expected.

Such a scenario, however, is probably too pessimistic. A key difference from prior busts is the low level of mortgage interest rates, which is allowing many struggling borrowers to continue to service their loans. The Council of Mortgage Lenders last week reported that repossessions and arrears cases rose by less than feared in the first quarter. The CML intends to revise down its earlier forecast of 75,000 repossessions in 2009.

With less distressed selling, downward pressure on prices from rising supply is much smaller than in prior downturns. According to the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, the number of unsold homes on the books of the average estate agent stood at 69 in April – far below peaks of 166 and 196 in the last two major housing downturns. Meanwhile, buyer enquiries have picked up recently.

Translating buyer interest into transactions depends critically on mortgage availability. The last Bank of England credit conditions survey reported tighter mortgage supply in early 2009 but expectations of an improvement in the spring. Signs of a stabilisation of prices could have a self-reinforcing effect by encouraging lenders to reduce current high deposit requirements, designed partly to protect against negative equity.

Of course, if house prices bottom at a smaller discount to fair value than in previous downturns, this also implies less scope for a significant recovery over the medium term. Moreover, an increase in supply may have been postponed rather than cancelled – "zombie" borrowers will have their life support turned off once the MPC starts raising interest rates.

All we’ve heard for the past few weeks is how little room there is for Labour to pump more money into the economy to fight the recession.

The increasingly popular — and confident — opposition Conservatives have gained ground by blaming Prime Minister Gordon Brown for turning the public purse into a public hearse.

But there are a few reasons to suspect that when finance minister Alistair Darling steps up to the dispatch box tomorrow, he will deliver another blockbuster life-support package.

Yes, there are inklings of a recovery out there — some experts say we have reached the bottom — but Labour has to make sure this recession is long gone before it can hope to win an election.

And it only has until mid-2010 to wait before that day of reckoning must come.

Brown might be willing to chance his arm with some big spending to reassure the public that job losses will be kept to a minimum and that Labour cares more about ordinary peoples’ lives in the here and now than it does about the budget deficit and government debt markets.

If this is the worst economic crisis for decades, then there is no easy way out of it and the best thing to do is to take whatever action is necessary to bring it to an end and worry about the consequences later.

Respected think tank the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has called for a temporary 30 billion pound stimulus aimed at stuffing employers and employees coffers with
cash.

They say the level of government debt is nowhere near where it was at the end of the Second World War and so there is no real panic about getting it back under control eventually. Yes, it may mean higher taxes and less public spending in the future, but that might be a fair price to pay to avoid mass unemployment and social unrest.

All the indications are that Labour won’t risk the ire of experts and opposition alike with another big stimulus, but the truth is they won’t get a second chance to reduce the severity of the downturn.

Besides all that, something interesting was happening in Westminster on Tuesday.

Rather than hounding the Prime Minister’s office with questions about the Budget, Britain’s press pack were jumping all over an emergency announcement on how rules governing the much-maligned MPs expenses system might be changed.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Brown has put up a smoke screen before delivering a knockout, headline-grabbing blow.

Bumper budgets are a tried and tested vote winner … but that might also be just what the economy needs.