• Is recession caused by domestic or international factors? - A mixture of the two. If the UK had avoided a credit and housing bubble, if the banks had been better regulated, the recession would have been less steep. However, given state of global economy, I doubt we could have avoided some kind of recession
• Why are banks not lending despite lower interest rates? - basically, recession, falling house prices and poor balance sheets all contribute to reluctance of banks to lend.
• UK's trade deficit narrows. - A little bit of good news amidst the gloom
• More on mistakes of the banks
• How to deal with problem of mortgage arrears - Barack Obama has recently announced a scheme to prevent home repossession in the US
  

Graph of UK interest rates