Paul Maunders | Web log

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 anyone to [...]

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, including:

Companies [...]

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 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 to [...]

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 just [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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:

Average 3-month [...]

Ways and Means Advances to HM Government is an entry that appears on the Bank of England’s Balance Sheet. As of the end of 2008, the figure stood at £369,847,840. Prior to 2000, this was basically the Government’s overdraft facility. The Bank of England provided a short term loan to balance the governments day to [...]

As part of my ongoing research into money I’ve been trying to understand the Bank of England’s balance sheet, and while looking through it I noticed an account called Cash ratio deposits.
At first I thought this was something to do with Reserve Requirements (sometimes known as the cash asset ratio or liquidity ratio), where [...]