In the October 2018 Tax Justice Network monthly podcast the Taxcast:
- We speak to Nicholas Shaxson about his new book The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer released alongside new research from the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute on the true costs of the City of London's oversized finance sector to the British economy — £4.5 trillion in lost economic output over a 20 year period — that's equivalent to £67,500 for every person in the UK, not far off $90,000. This research has serious implications for oversized financial centres everywhere.
- Also, we discuss the brutal murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the hypocrisy of the ‘west' and corruption of democracy by dark money and national and international security threats not only from Russia, but also from China and, the most overlooked — the United States.
Featuring:
- Nicholas Shaxson, journalist and author of Treasure Islands and his latest book The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
- John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network
- Produced and presented by Naomi Fowler of the Tax Justice Network
I looked at the Bank of England data and it was 3.5% of business lending went to manufacturing, a century or so ago that number would have been more like 80% and that's a trend that has been going on for a long time. And you compare this 3.5% going to manufacturing with 75% going to either finance or real estate and you can see that something's wrong, finance has become kind of unmoored and disconnected from the real economy.”
~ Nick Shaxson
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Enjoyed the podcast and really enjoyed Shaxson’s book. I hadn’t really appreciated how bad things were and how much our democracy has been diluted. Not too many good things to say about the EU either. Having read that I feel pessimistic and don’t think we’ll ever recover our democratic rights. Too many of the people who become MPs have already been ‘turned’ and the rest are just thick. So the slogan of the Labour Party is For the Many not the Few but only if the Few agree to it. Some hope.
Kitson and Michie https://www.cbr.cam.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/centre-for-business-research/downloads/working-papers/wp459.pdf have a lot of facts and figures for those wanting a bout of depression on UK manufacturing. Thanks for all the effort everyone must put in to the podcast.
Interesting article and tax cast it doesn’t sound good for the larger financial empires and how wayward finance has become in general.