Luke Johnson, the Pizza Express owner-turned private equity millionaire, has written in the Financial Times today about how ’socialism’ is threatening to strangle heroic capitalist entrepreneurs (like himself). Some of the signs of this ’socialism’ that he points to are the 50p tax rate (of course – funny how that has really got under greedy rich people’s skin), subsidies to GM and Chrysler to pay for their “massively over-rewarded” (sic) workers, and strangling laws like (oh yes, here it comes) health and safety. You’ll note that no one ever specifies which industrial accidents or diseases they would be happy to inflict on their workers. Read more »

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

I am in Australia visiting my sister and her family, and the effect of climate change is evident all around. In Bendigo, Victoria, where she lives, there has been a full-on drought for over a decade. When I first visited over 20 years ago, Victoria was as green as South East England. Now, it is mostly yellow, and some bits of the countryside are beginning to fade to greyness. And yet Australian employers are still holding out against firm action on climate change. Read more »

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The CBI has entered the G20 fight by publicly opposing a crackdown on tax havens and bank bonuses. They are calling for corporate greed to be ignored so world leaders can concentrate on sorting out the mess that corporate greed caused.So now we know where the battle lines over the G20 will be drawn – do we put profits first, or people? If you want to put people first, come on the March for Jobs, Justice, Climate on 28 March.

Martin Broughton, CBI President and chairman of British Airways, told the Financial Times today that the London Summit on 2 April should focus on a global stimulus and opposing protectionism. But it needs to do more. Tackling tax havens and bank bonuses, as well as global poverty and climate change, would be a crucial signal that the G20 is serious about going beyond mere sticking plaster, business as usual measures.

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

Many people have ‘got it’ by now, but our series still has some life in it, as today’s FT shows. Jamie Whyte says the PM is wrong to ban bankers’ big bonuses, because it wasn’t the bonus system that caused the crisis, it was the fact that the whole world banking system failed to price properly the risks being taken with other people’s money. The bankers should continue to get their bonuses, because all they are guilty of is incompetence. That’s alright then.

Jamie is cited at the foot of his column as the author of a book subtitled “a guide to clear thinking”. So he should understand why people who can’t even do the jobs they’re paid for shouldn’t get bonuses.

Footnote: Alright, he’s not exactly banning them, but the alliteration was too perfect to resist.

P.S. check out the Irish Congress of Trade Unions’ latest online video. And I write as a cat-lover. Good luck with Saturday’s demo!

UPDATE: 100,000 people turned out in Dublin for the demonstration this afternoon. Follow their example and March for Jobs, Justice and Climate in London on Saturday 28 March

   Filed under: Financial crisis, They Just Don't Get It | Comments Off

In the 1980s, when working in the finance sector was considered next to godliness, Oliver Stone made a film called Wall Street in which the anti-hero, Gordon Gekko made “greed is good” a catchphrase for the era of masters of the universe. It was meant ironically of course, but many people in the finance sector seem to have had an irony bypass, as well as a moral-compass bypass and, as we have found out in the last year, a being-any-good-at-your-job bypass. The rest of us, of course, know that greed is a sin. And we also know that envy of those bonus-boosted bankers is also a sin (Former Cionservative MP Angela Knight wins today’s “They just don’t get it” award for arguing that).

But I’ve decided it isn’t. I’ve read some of what big bank bosses said to the House of Commons Select Committee and like most people I know I was appalled at their lack of contrition. We’ve all been pussy-footing around about this and we ought to stop.

We should indeed be very, very envious, and very, very angry – not so much about the bonuses as about the impunity with which top bankers have survived the crash they caused. It is quite different to the punishment that is being meted out to ordinary people in the US, the UK, and especially in the developing countries. March with us on 28 March if you agree.

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   Filed under: Financial crisis, Inequality, Recession, They Just Don't Get It | Comments Off

The billionaire investor, Jim Rogers, has been in the news today telling anyone who’ll listen that they should sell sterling.  Leaving that aside, if you wanted an indication of how out of touch market fundamentalism has become, you could do no worse than listen to the interview Rogers gave to Radio 4’s PM programme today.  This brilliant investor’s solution to the current crisis is to let all the banks go to the wall.  But fear not, he reassures us, things will be rough for a couple of years but then private capital will rush in and we’ll all be tickety-boo.  Essentially, leave it to the market to flush out the bad debt and start from scratch again.  Read more »

   Filed under: Financial crisis, Recession, They Just Don't Get It | 2 Comments »

Although David Cameron launched it, I assume George Osborne must have at least agreed the latest Conservative plan - to incentivise saving with tax relief paid for by cutting (unspecified) public spending. And I’m very disappointed, because George and I went to the same school and the same university (albeit he’s a bit younger than  me) so we probably took the same economics courses, and maybe even had the same teachers. Apparently, I needn’t have bothered listening to them – clearly George didn’t, and he’s now the Shadow Chancellor! Read more »

   Filed under: Economics, Politics, Recession, They Just Don't Get It | 4 Comments »

A staggering and swaggering entry into the “they just don’t get it” category is the article by Czech President Vaclav Klaus in the FT today. He argues that the best way out of the current crisis is to deregulate everything. Sorry, I exaggerate. He actually only wrote that:

“The best thing to do now would be temporarily to weaken, if not repeal, various labour, environmental, social, health and other “standards”, because they block rational human activity more than anything else.”

Note that when people make such sweeping statements, they never specify which standards should go – the rules against drink driving, or use of asbestos, or sending children up chimneys? No, of course not, only the “bad” standards, like …. er…..something I overheard someone make up in a pub….

Thankfully, the Czech President is not in charge of the Czech Presidency of the EU. He’s in charge of important stuff, like whether to fly the EU flag or not (that’ll show those b-Euro-crats). Honestly, you couldn’t make it up!

   Filed under: Europe, They Just Don't Get It | 1 Comment »

The heartwarming New Year message from the British Chambers of Commerce is that the minimum wage should be frozen from October 2009.  I’ll write about this in more detail once I’m over the New Year revelries. But I had to say something about Tim Worstall’s piece calling for the same on the Guardian website.  Worstall is a fellow of the Adam Smith Institute and if you wanted a sign of how out of touch that breed of ideologue now is, you could do no better than this mind-bending sentence from the Guardian article:

Things in markets are worth what the markets say they are worth.

Worstall must inhabit a parallel universe where the inability of the financial markets to correctly price just about anything hasn’t led to a global economic crisis.  His comment pretty much sums up the deeply ideological and flawed nature of the rest of the article.  I’ll return to it soon.

   Filed under: Labour market, They Just Don't Get It | 7 Comments »

Once again the Taxpayers Alliance are all over the media. Today’s claim is that councils are spending millions on ’spin’ through an analysis of council’s PR budgets. But this is even more thinly based than most TPA reports. Councils have a statutory duty to advertise things like planning applications – hardly spin. Nor do I think the leaflet that comes through my door at this time of year telling me when the bins will be emptied over Christmas is propaganda, simply useful information.

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