As the Guardian notes this morning:
Gordon Brown tonight called on the world’s most powerful industrial nations to agree a programme of immediate and coordinated tax cuts to prevent the global economy sliding deeper into recession.
This is the wrong presecription for this weekend, unless that is you’re a politician hoping to improve your ratings in opinion [...]
At least the government has seen sense and offered the Post Office network an essential lifeline by renewing the Post Office Card Account contract. Now it it time to move one. As New Economics Foundation director Stewart Wallis said in the Guardian this morning:
The Post Office must now be grown into a banking system built [...]
I believe, quite emphatically, in the importance of a fiscal stimulus for our economy at this point of time. Counter cyclical spending is an essential component of economic strategy for any government facing recession.
There are two ways of delivering a fiscal stimulus. One is to cut taxes. The other is to increase government spending. Both [...]
I’m amazed. The Monetary Policy Committee have cut interest rates in the last few minutes by 1.5% to a new rate of 3%. In doing so they proved two things. First of all, they can ignore their inflation remit. I have no doubt they did. Second, they are not independent. This body was not inclined [...]
Tax journalist Andrew Goodall has written about the World Bank’s reluctance to address the issue of measuring capital flight or the quantum of tax lost to the developing world as a result of it. He says:
I don’t blame Baker or anyone else for trying to assess the impact of capital flight. If, as suggested, it [...]
From the FT this morning:
But there are still big differences between Paris and London about the lessons to draw from the crisis and a fear in the Elysée that Mr Brown, the UK prime minister, is still committed to preserving a light-touch regulatory regime for the City of London.
French officials say the strongest message that [...]
According to Joseph Stiglitz:
Growth is not just a matter of increasing GDP. It must be sustainable: growth based on environmental degradation, a debt financed consumption binge, or the exploitation of scarce natural resources, without reinvesting the proceeds, is not sustainable. Growth also must be inclusive; at least a majority of citizens must benefit. Trickle-down economics [...]
Will Hutton wrote under the above title today.
I think that the article is important for three reasons. The first is that someone like Hutton can say that he is a Keynesian. It has been hard to do that for a long time.
The second is that he seeks to shatter the myth that Keynesianism is simply [...]
I wrote the following on the Guardian web site today:
The New Labour experiment deserves to die. There are many reasons. But let me offer just one: it has failed to deliver tax justice.
Tax justice can be defined in various ways. It can be horizontal justice, so that all those on similar income pay similar overall [...]
All reports seem to agree that Barclays’ negotiations with its new backers in Qatar and elsewhere were undertaken by Robert Jenkins. He is a man I have written about before.
The Sunday Times says of him:
Jenkins is known primarily as a tax expert. The 52-year-old is famous for devising complex structures that ferry profits around the [...]
