RAPID RESPONSES December 14, 2011 A flatter tax pitch I gratefully acknowledge the coalition’s willingness to embark on a witch-hunt of benefit cheats, but I am not convinced they have the courage to tackle tax cheats with the same vigour. A company I jointly founded some years ago was put into voluntary liquidation as a result of not being able [...]
Time to say the unsayable – European unification needs to restart without the euro December 13, 2011 DAVID Cameron’s veto last week expresses again the British elites’ long running ambivalence to the European project. Though probably not his intention, his oppositional stance also represented something perhaps more novel: a tiny dent to the dominant assumption that nothing is more important today than “saving the euro”. A parallel point to ponder is that [...]
Durban’s climate conference puts green deal on ice December 13, 2011 AFTER two weeks of talks and partying, delegates at the UN climate summit in Durban agreed to meet again for further talks and partying around the dream of a global climate treaty. As expected, an informal coalition of major emitters such as the USA, China, India and Russia won the battle at the climate talks [...]
Automatic fines are a SAD Eurozone policy December 13, 2011 THE cold war policy of mutual assured destruction stuck many people as mad. If the Soviet Union was wicked and foolish enough to launch a nuclear attack on the United States, killing millions of innocent Americans and plunging the planet into a nuclear winter, it would be crazy to compound this wickedness with a retaliatory [...]
RAPID RESPONSES December 13, 2011 Higgs resurrected After Philip Ball’s Forum piece on the Higgs boson [Physicists are hunting for a so-called God particle, but their faith is dwindling fast, 25 November] I had begun to wonder if the £6bn large hadron collider was simply the most expensive piece of scientific equipment that had ever been set up to search [...]
Critics of listing rules in the UK should bear in mind how the system actually works December 12, 2011 MUCH has been written in recent weeks about the question of safeguarding the high standards of London’s listed equity market in the face of a spate of listings of international commodity stocks. Many of these articles assume it is the role of the UK Listing Authority (UKLA) to insist on full compliance with the Corporate [...]
Another summit, another letdown by Europe’s elite December 12, 2011 AUSTAN Goolsbee, former chairman of President Obama’s council of economic advisers, is hardly a virulent eurosceptic. However, his assessment of the prospects of the common currency is very stark: in his view, as long as European leaders remain wedded to a utopian vision of political union in Europe, they will have to keep fighting off [...]
Government spending won’t fix the economy December 12, 2011 WHEN looking at investment data during the recent recession two key things emerge. The first is that UK investment (or “Gross Fixed Capital Formation”) has not fully recovered (see top chart, below). It did bounce back, but once more the growth rate is negative. However, to understand what is going on, it’s important to look [...]
RAPID RESPONSES December 12, 2011 Deutsch courage [Re: David Cameron was right to say No, yesterday] Believe me: most people here in Germany are very concerned about that elite project called €. Once more in history, the UK is doing the right thing. It seems that German leaders haven’t learned anything from the past. See the readers’ comments in German [...]
To save the euro and end the liquidity crisis Germany needs to leave the Eurozone December 11, 2011 THE crisis in the Eurozone is widely portrayed as being about solvency and the need for fiscal balance and austerity, but in fact these are longer term issues – the immediate crisis is one of liquidity. Solvent countries can’t roll over their existing stock of debt, as the available liquidity behind the largest economy in [...]