Income inequality and the foreign conundrum
There are echoes of pre-Chavez Venezuela in the UK these days. A classic example of elite capitalism and the virtually insurmountable gap between the haves and have nots. In Caracas, the elite lived in guarded mansions in the Eastern hills of the city with bodyguards accompanying them everywhere. The benefits of decades of petroleum revenues never made it into the barrios of the Western hills of the city. President Hugo Chavez was the result.
The Real Role of Chairman Mao
Rumour of the week: The UK election will be called for the end of March, not May. The government is worried that first quarter GDP figures will show the UK falling back into negative growth after the wimpish 0.1% GDP growth number for the fourth quarter of 2009. As other countries continue growing, a negative number announced a couple of weeks before the expected date of a May election will look all the more pitiful.
If this is true – and it has the ring of truth – the Labour Party is taking us for fools. The same goes for the Conservatives, with their daft pledge, plastered on billboards everywhere, that they won’t touch the NHS.
BA’s ceo Walsh on strategic imperatives
A tax system should be straightforward and predictable. Gordon Brown’s tinkering with the tax system in his years as Chancellor put paid to the former. Moves on the tax front in 2009 have put paid to the latter. The City will suffer.
My worry is that the latest “one-off” bonus tax may become an annual charge. Think about it. Assuming the Conservative Party makes it into power in May, it will be faced with even worse government finances, following Chancellor Alistair Darling’s budget, which failed to make the budget cuts that markets will demand soon enough.
To the BBC to talk about bankers’ bonuses. The idea of clawback provisions seems the height of imbecility to me. It is all arbitrary, all to do with where we are in the economic cycle. For instance, assuming a banker had a clawback provision for the suggested three years anytime between 2001 and the first half of 2007, he would have received it in full.
I did suggest to the interviewer that politicians should also be subject to them. She rapidly moved on, perhaps alarmed at the thought of my mentioning an incumbent prime minister or two.