Almost 5 years after the crash, the UK economy remains in the doldrums. Now even the IMF is critical of the UK’s austerity programme. But the government is not for turning from its basic pursuit of austerity plus miniscule photo opportunity gestures like letting small businesses off their National Insurance contributions for a period. But [...]
We are experiencing an explosion of inequality to levels not seen since the darkest days of the nineteenth century, inequality, not just of wealth but, as George Monbiot suggested (The Guardian, 2nd April 2013), also of ‘decency, honesty and kindness’. His analysis is that the 99% have the virtues, while the 1% have the [...]
So President Francois Hollande has not given up on his election promise to levy a 75% tax on those who pay themselves, or get paid, in excess of €1m (£840,000) pa. The French high court rejected his original proposal, but it seems the revised version, to levy the tax on the payers rather than [...]
Every day, the BBC – in fact the whole media circus – faithfully report the progress of the FTSE100 share index, as though it were a portent of our economic future. Every day so called “experts” explain in detail the reasons for FTSE100 movements seemingly on the assumption that it still relates to the UK [...]
Advanced economies everywhere seem to be led by politicians who are media competent but practically inexperienced. They seem not to have learned from the experiences of 2012, but there are vital lessons to be learned and changes need to be made.
Recession: The much talked of double-dip morphed into talk of triple-dip and the [...]
Sir Nigel Rudd is in the news again for selling off some more of UK Plc to foreign competitors. This time he has disposed of the hi-tech railway signalling and control equipment business of Invensys for £1.7bn to German competitor Siemens, recipient of the government’s £1.4bn Thameslink rail contract, in preference to Derby based [...]
After the Rigor rate fixing scandal, and the PPI mis-selling fiasco, we now have hysteria over gas and electricity companies fixing market prices to their advantage at the expense of the general customer. Well of course they’ve been doing that, it’s what they do. They aren’t charities. They charge whatever the market will bear. [...]
Globalisation reduces the cost of goods and services as their production migrates to the lowest cost parts of the world. The lower prices are a benefit for everyone and the low cost parts of the world, which are only now beginning to industrialise, gain tremendously in terms of economic growth and employment. So globalisation is [...]
Will Hutton is courageously idiosyncratic about innovation, proposing a simple combination of general purpose technologies (GPTs) and good capitalism as the explanation for the rapid rise in living standards in the west over the last 250 years. For Hutton, the source of growth is ‘the combination of science’s capacity to transform how we live and [...]
Ed Balls is talking about Labour’s ‘big strategy’ decisions on taxation and spending. He wants to be seen as ‘ruthless and disciplined’ about ‘every penny’ of public spending. Hence his ‘zero-based budgeting review’, which is really a bit of motherhood flim-flam, totally devoid of specifics, dreamed up for the benefit of credulous voters.
The [...]
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