So we are now 4 years in to the worst recession since the 1980s, 1970s, 1930s, records began? and it seems like we are going to be stuck this way for a long time. Governments, individuals and companies around the world have racked up massive debts during the boom years, but they are now struggling [...]
Archive | politics RSS feed for this section
Summary of Emergency Budget 2010 measures
I’ve seen a lot of different measures from today’s budget quoted in the media, so I thought I’d try to summarise some of the key points in one place for quick reference! Headline Figures By 2015/2016…. Spending cuts will have reached £99 billion per year. Taxes to rise by £29 billion per year. Total consolidation [...]
My UK Election Wish List
There will be an election in the UK within the next 6 months, so I thought I would take some time to compile a list of the major issues that will influence my vote. So here’s my wish list for our next government: All government spending and contracts should be published openly, and available for [...]
Working with Government APIs
It may have been a long time coming, but I have to say the UK Government has now made pretty good progress when it comes to making their services available online – and we have taken advantage of this with our online accounting system, Clear Books. Clear Books integrates with a number of Government APIs, [...]
Effective 2009-2010 Tax Rates
If you factor Employee’s and Employer’s National Insurance Contributions into the total deductions made by the tax man, then most people pay closer to 30% tax than the headline basic rate of 20%. The following graph shows the total % tax paid by an employer + employee for a given nominal gross salary. This includes [...]
Replacing benefits with a Basic Income
For a while now I have been thinking that there must be a better way to re-distribute income in our society. The current welfare system is hugely inefficient and complicated with all the means testing and civil servants needed to administer it. Our system is also full of perverse incentives, whereby it encourages people NOT [...]
Monetising the debt – BoE to buy UK Government Bonds
So it has happened: these extraordinary times have caused our Government to look to Zimbabwe for economic policy inspiration and so, as of last week, the Bank of England will begin a £150 billion programme of printing money. Technically referred to as Quantitative Easing, it’s actually a lot easier than printing money, and more environmentally friendly too: the Bank [...]
Stability versus Flexibility aka Euro versus Pound
For the past 10 years I’ve been undecided as to whether Britain should join the European single currency, the Euro. At first I was leaning towards the Euro, thinking that a level playing field of prices across Europe would encourage competition, making prices more transparent across a larger market, and therefore bring down prices in [...]
How to borrow from the Bank of England
As regular readers of my and / or Brendan’s blog and twitter feeds may know, we have been looking into how to set up a bank. The primary reason being that if the Bank of England embarks on a policy of quantitative easing (otherwise known as printing money / helicopter money), then we want to [...]
Bank of England Statistics Database
I just found a cool tool on the Bank of England site for anyone interested in financial / monetary stats. Basically the Interactive Stats Tool lets you search through a huge amount of statistical releases and then download them in either CSV, Excel, XML or HTML formats. Here’s some examples of what you can get: [...]
Subscribe / Connect
Subscribe to our e-mail newsletter to receive updates.
