The real reason why energy prices are spiralling out of control October 17, 2013 LIKE most readers, I have had my run-ins with energy companies. One especially pushy door to door salesperson once tried to forcefully convince me that I needed to sign up to his firm because I had just moved into a new home. Fortunately, I wasn’t naïve enough to succumb to his lies but many others [...]
This crisis has been averted but the debt clock is still ticking October 16, 2013 SO IT appears to be a case of crisis deferred: as I write, the US seems sure to avoid default, for the next few months anyway. A temporary deal has been cobbled together; the big losers, it appears, are the Republicans who didn’t get anything meaningful. Yet the mad charade of the past few days [...]
It’s a tragedy that the Royal Mail’s sell-off has been so chaotic October 15, 2013 IT goes without saying that, with the benefit of hindsight, the government sold the shares in Royal Mail too cheaply. A decent discount would have been fine; they are routine with flotations and privatisations as the buyers are taking a risk and nobody knows the value of a firm before it starts trading. A deliberate [...]
What the latest Nobel Prize winners in economics can teach us October 14, 2013 SOME people still remember their university exam questions; I can still vaguely recall a few if I really put my mind to it. But I vividly remember a mock exam we were given in an undergraduate financial economics course at the London School of Economics in the late 1990s. It went something like this: if [...]
Miliband’s policies have already damaged Britain’s economy October 13, 2013 EVERY so often, financial markets spectacularly misjudge an issue. One such blunder took place immediately after Ed Miliband announced his policy to freeze gas and electricity prices for the first 18 months of a Labour government. Instead of heading for the exits, investors sat on their hands. Shares barely fell that first afternoon, despite extensive [...]
Delivering a privatisation by punishing enthusiasm is wrong October 10, 2013 IT IS an utter scandal that those who applied for more than £10,000 worth of Royal Mail shares were awarded nothing. Why? Since when is a privatisation to be conducted along class war lines? And if that is what the coalition wanted in the first place, why not cap the allocation from the start, or [...]
Top 1 per cent of income taxpayers are bailing out the Treasury October 9, 2013 THERE is no better snapshot of modern Britain than the regular updates from HMRC on the taxes we pay and the income we earn. The latest batch doesn’t disappoint. There will be just 29.3m income taxpayers in 2013-14, 2m lower than in 2010-11 as a result of the increase in the personal allowance. There will [...]
Our flawed education system is betraying our young people October 8, 2013 I F YOU want to understand the real crisis facing Britain, look no further than yesterday’s league tables on educational performance. The results were disgraceful: young people in England were rated a shocking 22nd out of 24 OECD countries for literacy and 21st for numeracy. We are the only country where 55-65 year olds are [...]
Our energy crisis, like America’s debt idiocy, is self-inflicted October 7, 2013 IT is easy to laugh at America’s political system, which is once again showing itself to be hopelessly defective as it trundles along towards a possible default. In a development which oozes geopolitical significance, China and Japan, America’s top creditors, yesterday made their displeasure known in no uncertain terms. It is exactly what those of [...]
It’s time to shred Britain’s complex and punitive tax system October 7, 2013 WHEN this government was first elected, it promised to simplify Britain’s tax code, which over the years has become one of the lengthiest in the world. To say that it failed would be a pathetic understatement. Our horrendous, maddening tax system keeps getting more complicated, with thousands of pages of incomprehensible nonsense added since 2010, [...]