From CNBC and the FT:
Overseas investors are moving back into the UK financial services sector, easing fears that London is losing its lustre as an international centre for the industry.
Foreign-owned businesses accounted for 9.1 percent of new authorizations by the Financial Services Authority in the first half of 2010. That is up 40 percent from 2009.
This is in spite of a crackdown on bankers’ pay and a 50 percent top rate of personal income tax.
Quite so.
And as I’ve always said would happen.
To put it another way, the talk of exodus is pure fantasy by those who would like it to happen.
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I would vote for a politician who, when faced with such threats to leave the UK, said “How soon can you go?”
In any case, what long term use are people with so little loyalty?
Well said Brian. Parasite is not too strong a word for these cosmopolitan banksters. We have it shoved down our throats about how they’re supposedly gods gift, but all they actually do is suck our resources into their luxury fake economy and push property prices up for the rest of us ‘little people’ who are then expected to bail them out when they crash.
Banks and financial companies are like supermarkets….they go wherever there are people.
On the other hand, the top 1% do contribute one quarter of all tax reciepts (1).
They may well be flighty/disloyal/unethical/addyourowninsulthere, but they are also extremely valuable to those who want well funded public services.
Oh, and the bank ‘bail out’ is actually on track to return a profit (at least at current equity values), so a ‘bail out’ in the charitable sense it ain’t. That’s not to defend the bank bonuses or industry structure though…
(1) http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/income_tax/table2-4.pdf
Well Gary, the rich always like to claim what a favour they are doing us by employing us and by paying taxes etc. But this misses the point that they are at the same time totally warping the economy out of a healthy shape into the shape of a plutonomy whose social and environmental outworkings are devastating in the longer term.
The plutonomy that we live under is destroying the ecological basis of our very existence as well as turning people into passive consumers of ‘public services’ that are doled out to us as a sop.
@between-the-lines
The rich are not claiming they pay taxes; rather HMRC are *telling* us that the rich do in fact pay taxes.
But yes, we are likely overexposed to wholesale financial services. But it’s rather a big leap of logic to say that, because we have too much wholesale FS in our economy, we are “passive consumers of ‘public services’ that are doled out to us as a sop.” that sounds like an entirely different arguement that the state should be less involved in the delivery (as opposed to funding) of public services.
Er Gary,
It is you who proclaimed that “the top 1% [sic] do contribute one quarter of all tax reciepts” as if this was some sort of achievement, when it would seem blatantly obvious that anyone with the vast quantities of capital that the “top 1%” have cornered for themselves should be contributing at least a little to the society which supports them. For all the song and dance that the richest make most of them contribute a lot less to society proportionally than those less fortunate.
As Brian commented, the sooner we are free of the financial manipulators the better it would be.
It was also you who made “the leap of logic” to talking about public services.
Since you raise the issue, the fact is that the plutocrats (your “top 1%”) have rigged a system whereby we can live on fantasy island, way beyond our means in the short term, only by borrowing heavily from the future, leaving our children with massive debts both financial, but more importantly ecological. In effect we are stealing our children’s future by financial sleight of hand.