NEST is the new low-cost default pension scheme for employers who do not have alternative arrangements when the new duty on employers to auto-enrol their staff and make pensions contributions starts to roll out in 2012.
We already knew a lot about how it will work, but there has been one big gap. But today we have learnt what its [...]

Filed under: Pensions | 1 Comment »

The National Audit Office today releases a report on the costs of public sector pensions. I write this before I can see whether it has provoked the usual barrage of hostile stories about the alleged gold-plating of public pensions, but if you actually read it, it tells a rather different story.

Filed under: Pensions | 1 Comment »

Unions are increasingly working with the environmental movement. We represent – or stand in solidarity with – many of those most likely to be badly hit by climate change. Union campaigns for health and safety in the workplace have always had much in common with wider campaigns against pollution. Many environmentalists have a similar commitment [...]

Filed under: Earnings, Economics, Energy, Environment | 28 Comments »

Giles, the free-thinking economist, describes me as amiable in his latest critique of the Robin Hood Tax.
I’m not sure my colleagues would agree with that, but I think I rather like that, so let me try an amiable response – though I fear that positions are now so well dug in that we are probably [...]

Filed under: Tax, Transactions tax | 10 Comments »

Duncan Green of Oxfam has a splendidly robust defence of the Robin Hood Tax against its detractors on his blog.
He is absolutely right that many of its critics have build vast superstructures out of arguments necessarily simplified to ensure the campaign goes wider than the wonk community.
And I share his (minor) criticisms of the campaign [...]

Filed under: Financial crisis, Tax, Transactions tax | 3 Comments »

I suppose the BBC thought it was being clever by offering up what it probably sees as limited sacrifices in an attempt to appease Rupert Murdoch and then giving the story as an exclusive to the Murdoch owned Times.
It hasn’t worked. The Times was contemptuous in its response calling the BBC “big, bloated and cunning”.

Filed under: Media, Politics | No Comments »

The Guardian has an interesting report tucked into the financial pages today. US banks are already making big profits and paying big bonuses.
Despite calls for restraint in multi-million dollar pay packages, Wall Street bonuses jumped by 17% to $20.3bn (£13bn) for 2009 as America’s financial services industry rebounded swiftly from the credit crunch to healthy [...]

Filed under: Transactions tax | No Comments »

Opponents of the Robin Hood tax would no doubt like to portray us as lefties who do not understand finance.
But here is the Conservative candidate for Swansea West, René Kinzett, on Conservative Home
Without new ways to raise money like the FTT, sooner or later, the people, like my constituents in Swansea, who have already paid [...]

Filed under: Tax | No Comments »

On Tuesday I responded to a Times piece that effectively said that the only cost to the UK of the bank crash was the money spent rescuing RBS, Lloyds and Northern Rock.
Yesterday the same argument appeared in the Guardian in an anonymous article by a “banker”, headlined “not all bankers are fat cats”. Nowhere in the [...]

Filed under: Financial crisis, They Just Don't Get It | No Comments »

Simon Culhane is the chief executive of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment. Its website describes it thus:
(CISI) is the largest and most widely respected professional body for those who work in the securities and investment industry in the UK and in a growing number of major financial centres round the world.
I think we [...]

Filed under: Financial crisis, Tax, They Just Don't Get It | 1 Comment »