The idea of a new wealth tax in the UK isn’t going away. In the last week, two parties have floated new plans. The Greens suggested an annual tax of 1-2% on personal wealth over …
If you think a wealth tax won’t hit you, you’re wrong
Category: Blog
The death of the middleman could restore trust in the financial industry
Will we ever trust the financial industry? The obvious answer is that we will not. How can we, when the first thought of every financier looking to create a new product is about how he …
Why Britain has the nastiest new homes in Europe
I wrote in last week’s magazine about the myth of tiny UK houses. Most people think that the average size of a UK home is smaller than the average size of any other European home. It isn’t. …
Yet more reasons to favour Isas over pensions
We’ve often written about our preference for Isas over pensions as a savings vehicle. The removal of the requirement for anyone to buy an annuity and of the cap on drawdown at retirement changes the equation a …
One more good reason to completely rethink inheritance tax
While I was standing around in the rain waiting to be interviewed for 5 Live earlier in the week, I got talking to an academic from the University of Stirling. He specialises, among other things, …
Disinflation is a very unreliable boyfriend
I have been making mutterings here for some years now about our expectations that inflation will make a comeback in the West. We’ve seen it in asset prices for ages, of course. But we have …
The bank born from a bribe
I spent the very early hours of yesterday morning broadcasting from Edinburgh’s tram depot* with Five Live’s Wake Up To Money (you can listen to the programme here). We talked about the size of Scotland’s …
There is no such thing as a ‘free’ government service
Is there a word more abused in the English language than ‘free’? Even if you just stick to the financial use of the word, the list of its misuse is never-ending. There are the BOGOF …
Do we really need so many charities?
I’ve written several times on the madness of the system regulating charities in the UK. We have 160,000 odd of them. Some are good (in that their net effect is positive for the general population). Some …
The mansion tax: opening the door to corruption and distortion
An article in the FT yesterday pointed to some of the problems that the increasingly inevitable looking mansion tax will throw up. At the moment, assuming the starting point for the tax is to be …