We’ll Pay for Banker Bashing
As Alastair Darling prepares to deliver a kick in the bonuses to successful bankers, pause for thought. As the bankers eye up properties in Zug and sunnier islands the tax burden falls heavier on those left behind. The harder you squeeze high-earners, the more will leave these shores – the tax on the many is increased by the few who leave. That is what happens when looters try to fleece the productive too much.
Bob Diamond, head of investment bank Barclays Capital, warned yesterday that businesses and individuals could flee the City – “both financial capital and human capital are extremely mobile”. Tory appeasement of City bashing will continue, led by the son of a son of a son of a stockbroker they stand on the sidelines for fear of being painted as friends of the City. Guy Hands is just one high-profile tax exile, many more are fleeing the 50% tax rate. We already seeing human capital flight…
UPDATE : How will the plan to tax bonuses cover the hedge fund community? It won’t is Guido’s guess, they are unregulated in the most and the capital is nominally held offshore. The hedgies in St James are the ones who take home 8-figure sums. Bankers and brokers will have to re-define bonuses as ‘profit shares’ and their limited partnerships as “mutual cooperatives”…
Darling/Brown’s tax appears to be aimed at punishing shareholders rather than individual overpaid bankers. Doesn’t seem clever when the Govt is a big shareholder and millions of pension funds are also tied in to bank shares.
Let them leave I say.The Bankers have led us into this mess through the casino banking arm of the system.There are plenty of graduates out there waiting to join the city and who would gladly accept their inflated salaries without the fat cat bonuses.Sickening that the bankers are already looking for tax loopholes in all this.
Get your head out of the sand. The UK makes its money from the banking industry. We are the capital of the world.
Soon, just like our once great manufacturing – we will have fucked this up as well.
Britain will become an island full of the worlds feckless misfits !
Why should the average worker pay higher taxes and work for longer to bail out rich, reckless bankers?
Why should the average banker, GP, dentist, high earner work longer hours and pay higher taxes to bail out recklessly incompetent (Labour) politicians?
Tax and spend; spend and tax.
It’s in Labour’s D-N-A.
We shouldn’t have bailed out zombie banks. The Tories to their credit opposed bailing out Northern Rock.
and don’t foget Borrow.
Tax ‘n Spend ‘n Borrow,
Borrow like there’s no tomorrow – ‘cos there isn’t
“We shouldn’t have bailed out the zombie banks”
bit fucking late for all that Guido.
could’ve, should’ve, would’ve.
the bankers are fucking potless who cares if they fuck off?
Technically the average worker is being taxed to bail out the Yanks, who sold us a duff bill of goods, comprising crap mortgages which stood no chance of ever being repaid, backed up by guarantees that had no value from AIG and other insurers who didn’t know what they were ensuring.
We owe all this to Bush Snr and Clinton.
Bankers merely bought and peddled the shit, not knowing the intrinsic quality was shiite and when it all went tits up, investors demanded their money back and Banks found their blance sheets torn to shreds, i.e. fucked.
But, lets be pragmatic, no-one at NuLieBore was moaning when Northern Crock was lending 125% against value and Gordo and the Treasury was more than glad to take the tax take by way of stamp duty and creating a false market of high prices houising stock which allowed stamp duty to go to record levels and death duties to encompass nearly every average household.
The proposed taxes are the knee jerk reaction of an envious and bigoted party going back to its class warfare roots in the hope of currying favour with voters whi it believes give a shit.
They will, Liebour out for a generation of more whilst another two generations pick up the tab.
Can’t believe what I’m readin here – from supposedly intelligent people. OK – here’s the deal.
TODAY:
A business wants to expand – hire more people too.
Owner goes down the bank and arranges a line of credit.
Banker makes a fee.
Fee is taxed in UK.
Banker does enough of these deals he gets a bonus.
Bonus is taxed in UK.
Fee and bonus are mostly spent in the UK – generates more tax.
TOMORROW:
A business wants to expand – hire more people too.
Owner goes to Singapore (no local banker) and arranges a line of credit.
Banker makes a fee.
Fee is taxed in Singapore
Banker does enough of these deals he gets a bonus.
Bonus is taxed in Singapore.
Fee and bonus are mostly spent in Singapore.
Those unable to understand this are called ‘Socialists’.
This island is already full of feckless misfits
We shouldn’t have bailed out zombie banks. The Tories to their credit opposed bailing out Northern Rock.
So now we know that Guido hates Northerners. Did dyou have a bad experience when you were in Hull?
Not really. Guido hates wasting taxpayers’ money. Propping up Northern Rock is a waste of billions.
LET MY PEOPLE GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
but if northern rock was not saved then we were told that there would be a complete meltdown in the whole banking sector.
oh, and it interesting to note that you, seeking the propganda everage of popular culture, ripped off your taxodus slogan from bob marley’s song exodus.
bob marley would be spinning in his fucking grave Guido.
Top advisers flee burning ship of New Labour, Darling announces doomed Tractor Stat plan, Woolas defends indefensible
”A complete meltdown in the whole banking sector.”
A lie wrapped in a riddle more like, the only thing different about Northern Rock was the Chancer of the Exchequer has his mortgage and savings with them, that was the only meltdown about to occur in the banking sector, the chancer losing his ill gotten gains.
Only reason Northern Rock was saved is North East vote Labour
Shift key broken?
But of course, it potentially saved a couple of Labour Seats in the North East, so the government thinks it was worthwhile.
said the northern subsidy junk.
you are like a fucking smackhead you stupid c’unt.
You can’t even get the city right, Z.
Northern Rock was based in Newcastle and no less than 30 Labour MPs’ seats depended on bonkers NR being propped up with tax payers’ money (largely collected from the City of London). Labour do it again — kill the golden goose to help an ailing chicken.
Hull is a reference to Guido’s Alma Mater
Doesn’t change the fact that Zacaroo is a muppet – as already pointed out, Northern Rock, as with everything Labour do, was all about holding onto a seats for Labour MPs. I suspect that some of those seats may well be going to the party of the other one eyed idiot next may anyway, given how well they did in the North East in the European Election.
Typical Labour hoon is our Zacaroo – someone says something it doesn’t like so it starts throwing around accusations of prejudice like all cowardly little socialist shitbags who possess neither the wit now the wisdom to actually debate a subject properly and prefer to sling mud to get their point accross.
The truth of the matter is that whole area’s been being subsidised for years, not just since Northern Rock. Ah, but of course, I was forgetting – it’s their ‘uman right to be able to sit on their arses all day knowing the rest of us mugs who work for a living will fund their lifestyles.
Yes, I know. They were all in the post office queueing in front of me sending parcels far and wide.
This sceptred isle has pawned it’s sceptres, time to go.
Herein lies one of the problems, calling banking an industry. The so called “bankers” invited all sorts of geeks with “a beautiful mind” to provide complex stratagems on how to recirculate money they did not have. In the process they stuffed genuine shareholders.
What idiocy to devise methods of selling and buying shares every second (or fraction of it) just to squeeze a tiny bit of profit out of a transaction. All it does is enrich the “banker” who made the transaction by increasing his bonus. Surely time for a Tobin tax to remove such idiotic activity from the banking armoury.
Banking should be the looking after ordinary people’s money to provide industry with the means to generate wealth for everyone. Not just the pointless recirculation of money for the casino gamblers.
As for the pension fund managers they were complicit with the bankers by lending them our pension money to play their stupid games. As major shareholders they should have played a much more active and interventionist role in ensuring responsiility in the banking sector.
So where was Gordon Brown’s FSA when all this was going on, hmmm? Doing bugger all as it was a Ponzi scheme. If the BoE hadn’t been stripped of its remit to regulate exactly this sort of scam by Brown, the first run on a bank for 150 years wouldn’t have happened. It started in Newcastle.
Ditherer Brown’s FSA was useless in regulation I don’t dispute that. He emasculated the BoE no doubt about that. Still does not alter the fact that the City’s banking is w***ing.
David Buick, City apologist, goes round claiming the City brought in £80 billion in tax revenues for us poor taxpayers and to allow ditherer Brown to dispense his largesse. Now we will all be repaying £800 billion for this largesse and the City’s profligacy.
I agree, Osama.
The world’s moved on, they’re a utility and should be managed as such.
People are being paid squillions for ponzi schemes when the whole shebang could be better managed by a bunch of Waynes and Darrens from Romford.
Hmm, it’s cost £750B and counting hasn’t it ? And that’s the goose that laid the golden egg ? Poisoned turd more like.
Well – Comrade Brown and Comrade Darling have spoken.
This country is heading towards a communist state, it’s the voters and the Labours MPs who have had their Heads in the sand for 12 years, allowing Darling, Brown and the rest of the Socialist/Trotskist educated elite to hood wink the British population.
Voteing anything other than Tory will allow Gordon and his bunch do their worst for another five years.
Susie the Tories opposed any regulation for their city friends. They will side with them once again.
The City is not opposed to regulation so long as the regulators have a clue i.e. the BoE. They don’t want Brown and his commie Euro friends’ regulations as it would kill any risk taking activity stone dead.
Ooooh that’s brilliant I hear you twitter, well if that’s the case we’d still be living in caves — life’s one big risk and always has been.
take the “will” out of the 2nd sentence,it should be past tense.
And if they don’t like working here why don’t they piss off then?
NO no no. It was Gordon Brown who caused this mess. Let’s not forget this all happened under his watch. He created the useless FSA and took powers away from the B o E.
The city is all we have left – there is no other predominant industry in this country. If the financial services go – we are buggered – well and truly (if we aren’t already!).
But please, never forget, that Gordon Brown and his policies caused this mess.
I think that enough people already know it was Brown who fucked the economy. That’s why he’s reduced to borrowing and printing exponential amounts of money just to pay the public sector. It’s throwing good money after bad. He’s lost the private sector voters and cannot risk confrontation with the public sector hence our descent into Mugabenomics.
Print money to pay the police force.
That’s all he’s got left. And class war. Just like Mugabe. Pay the police with printed money and blame the whites (bankers) for fucking up the country when it was his imbecile Marxist redistributionist policies that fucked it up.
And the good old ZBC is there giving him free propaganda slots 24/7 to transmit bullshit and lies about what a great fellow he is. No mention at all that the Fed chairman has shit on Brown’s woefully incompetent decision to create his useless FSA.
Nope. Brown is a world leader, saviour of the world.
The BBC is the enemy of the people.
brown and the banks fucked the economy.
get it right.
Artificially low interest rates, insane private and public borrowing, non-existent oversight and an incompetent Labour government fucked the economy.
By 2006/7 the situation was so over-borrowed both privately and nationally it was only a question of what would fail first. Loss of confidence in insanely over-priced housing and the muppet borrowers ability to pay. Jeeeez – who could have seen that coming?
My question would be – what kind of muppet couldn’t see it coming.
Not really Harry,repeating a lie doesn’t make it true.Do check your facts.
What’s the lie? Please tell.
The banks F*cked the economy under Brown’s watch. He let them do it and he knew what they were up to.
Did Grodon Brown cause the collapse of the banking sector? Probably not.
Did Gordon Brown, as chancellor, use the many years of economic boom to put the country in to a good economic position from which it would be able to withstand an economic storm? (After all, as sure as eggs is eggs, an economic boom is followed by an economic slump; the rest, as they say, is just a matter of timing.)
No he didn’t. You have to separate cause and effect. The cause of the current problems is the banking collapse. The effect we are feeling is due to catastrophic miss-management of the countries finances for the past 10 years.
Well that is what I meant. His reckless spending and his policies have caused economic slump in this country. If he had been a better chancellor then the recession could have been a lot less severe. It was the US and British banks that caused the banking slump for many reasons, as you will know. But Brown DID know the banks were selling dodgy (or toxic) debt as investment packages to unsuspecting victims or countries.
Brown should never have taken power away from the Bank of England as things could have been very different – especially for this country.
The deliberate running-into-the-buffers of the UK’s finaicial services sector was always THE prime objective of ZanuLieborg and the GramscoFabiaNazis. What’s happening now has always been planned accurately and in particular by them.
Why do you think Blair ate all those Prawn Cocktails in the mid-90s?
Our trouble is that we failed to spot that our mortal enemies think very, very far ahead. They have had to, for we are so successful at making poverty, want and misery hideous by showing what else will be achieved instead, that they would have had not a ghost’s chance of destroying civilisation otherwise. they learned this, and we forgot they still had brains and were also unfathomable evil and wicked.
Typical view of an idiot who buys into all that moronic populist BS that politicians are spouting. The only reason the bankers were able to get into this mess in the first place is because Brown took so much power away from the Bank of England and passed it over to the completely useless FSA. Whilst the banks are not blameless for what has happened, it was Brown that let it happen in the same way that someone who leaves their front door open give a burglar the opportunity to rob them.
I’d like to think that maybe you can grasp these pretty simple concepts, but I suspect your head is probably way too far up your arse.
As for your comment about there being plenty of graduates ready to fill people who leave’s shoes, you clearly don’t understand that it won’t just be the people who relocate outside the UK, it will be the companies they work for as well. I don’t like the situation we’re in, but it’s there, there’s not much we can do about it, and all Brown and Darling are doing is trying to shift the blame away from the Government, and it’s gullible twats like you that enable them to be partially successful in doing so.
Maybe you should stick to commenting on things where you’re not way out of your depth – I hear there are some cracking discussions about X-Factor on The Sun’s website.
Absolutely. The sooner this gang of thieves buggers off the better. I still reckon they’re guilty of economic terrorism. Their corruption and greed have caused us more damage than 9/11 and 7/7 put together. If this was in China they’d have had a bullet through their necks and their kidneys would have been sold on ebay before they could say RBS.
Can’t see the bankers being hurt by this government. Mandelson spends all of his spare time and much of his work time in the company of Nat Rothschild. That is hardly an anti banker stance is it?
He is greasing up to him to be a Pheasant Plucker.
Cheek!
Is it true that Meddlesome and Rothschild are working on a deal to reintroduce toll roads and a privatised motorway scheme? Should be a lucrative number for anyone connected to it no doubt, shame about the plebs who will be forced to pay even more to go anywhere.
The peoples flag and all that, blah, blah, blah.
“Mandelson shows Labour is a party rotten with decadence”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-1231313/PETER-OBORNE-Mandelson-shows-Labour-party-rotten-decadence.html
Bloody shame they didn’t mistake Cherie for a pheasant though.
I expect cars with regs earlier than “06″ will be banned from going on them.
Get the poor off the road, that’s the spirit!
The the hockey stick graph and the CRU’s fudge factor
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/revenge_of_the_computer_nerds_1.html
Wow. If this stuff is real it really should have a wider audience.
It is true.
Climategate reveals ‘the most influential tree in the world’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6738111/Climategate-reveals-the-most-influential-tree-in-the-world.html
Now that is really clutching at straws. Do you have to prove that you have a double digit IQ before they allow you to be called a sceptic?
You need a single digit IQ to believe the rubbish being spouted by the AGW lobby. They’ve got quite a lot of it wrong, but they can’t admit it yet.
“As Alastair Darling prepares to deliver a kick in the bonuses to successful bankers”
You have defeated your argument straight away. Plodding Chancellors are no match for successful bankers. Successful bankers will run rings around any legislation that Mr Darling introduces, they do this sort of thing all day every day.
You can almost guarantee, if not in cast eyeron, that within those plans to soak the rich will be a get out for big money to avoid paying and a ratcheting down on those who are not so fortunate, like the middle class.
It is what ZaNuLab do, it`s in their DNA.
“Almost guarantee? Unlike a Cameron dodgy guarantee, this is a certainty.
Plodding chancellors? Plodding small town solicitors more like.
If you want to know why the recession occurred in the UK, let’s look at last nights Newsnight. An ex-Bank of England monetary committee member said that “the public sector bailed out the private sector” (sic). What money does the public sector generate for the economy? With taxes and regulation rising why would anyone be surprised the private sector is shrinking? With manufacturing moving abroad with New Labour’s blessing, why would anyone be surprised there is nothing to drive the UK out of recession?
It’s people like the professor in the clip that created the UK’s recession.
Be warned, you might want to throw something at your monitor.
Agreed, good session last night during the nowadays often turgid Liebore Climate Fest Newspeak programme. Blanchflower looks, talks and sounds like a politician and not a professor and came apart at the seams a la every other ZNL apologist under the twin barrels of Lawson and Robinson. Bet Newspeak got a call from Mandlebum afterwards; two against one? But then again the Boob probably thought, as a “professor”, that Blanchflower could take care of that. But not, as it turned out.
Saw the arch oily lizard Mendelsome this morning on TV – looking very tired around the eyes – to be an insider in Downing St at this moment would be a simply incredible thing – to see and hear the machinations of this government in it’s death throws would make Hitler’s last days in the bunker seems like a routine meeting of the Purley Flower Arranging Society.
Blanchflower is a number one prized twat of the highest order.
Lord Lawson needs to visit a Barbers shop.
Thought Robinson was good. He is right about the Public sector – just so badly and inefficiently run and managed
To hear this arsehole saying that the public sector saved the private sector is simply amazing – next he will say that Monday follows Thursday and Tiger Woods is a safe driver who never pumps his iron.
I reckon I fell asleep in 1997 and am still having a never ending nightmare – will I ever wake up?
Yes I did at Nigel Lawson and the person sitting alongside him.I thought the professor spoke a lot of sense.The other two were just greedy capitalists.
Only lazy little gobshites who are too thick and useless to make something of themselves talk the way you do you useless little tosser.
Why don’t you fuck off to China if you hate greedy capitalists so much.
…. and take a look at Simon Jenkins today for why nothing will change
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/08/slash-bureaucracy-bloated-public-sector
Well one of those who created the mess was of course Nigel but he was junior to the worst of all the Mighty Maggie and her mte Ron between them they created a bubble based on greed which to their shame all successors were too afraid to challange. What is so unfair now is that once again it’s the poor who wll pick up the bill for the bastards who have lived high on the hog for all these years. Let the wankers go is what I say.
the sooner worthless c’unts like the vampire bob diamond fuck off and stop sucking the life from our economy the better.
innit.
He already left you stupid Hunt. He lives in New York. He like many others has seen the fucked up state of Britain and voted with his feet. As have many others. Enjoy your scorched earth coutesy of ZNL Britain.
so tell me zimbo if you are such a clever c’unt: why is bob in the papers mouthing off about freedom of capital to move out of countries?
because he is a thief who has escaped the scene of his crime zimbo, that is the reason why you dumb fuck.
end of lesson.
oh and I did say vampires LIKE bob diamond.
do read comments first before shouting your mouth off you spastic.
thankyou.
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/centreright/2009/12/do-top-earners-pay-their-fair-share-of-tax.html
Do top earners pay their fair share of tax?
In City AM, Allister Heath thinks they do:
“The top 10 per cent of earners are already set to pay 53.6 per cent of income tax in 2008-09; the top five per cent will pay 43 per cent and the top one per cent 23.9 per cent. Yes, that’s right, just one per cent of the population will pay close to a quarter of the total income tax take, funding a massive chunk of the welfare state – who ever said the rich don’t pay their “fair share”, whatever that means?”
The obvious answer is to impose currency exchange controls to stop them taking their money out of the country. I await this progressive announcement in the PBR.
50 Quid limit will be fine. That will keep the money in the Country. We should also impose a luxury tax of 200% on any imported car. Still puzzled how a 3rd London Airport is Carbon Neutral. Why not simply ban all flying straight away. Sail ships will be perfectly adequate.
Not sailing ships. There should be galleys and the passengers will have to row. This way Britaion can reach its target on reducing obesity.
But the health and safety lessons would mean the boats will never leave port – they would need to learn how to hold the oar/s,how often to breath and keep upright,how often to take a break,how etc etc.
A pilot wouldn’t turn off the jest’s engines mid flight, would he? So why should a galley captain take his foot off the throttle half way to Spain?
What’s wrong with paying massive bonuses? At 50% taxation it is a win win situation for both the tax payer and the scroungers…as long as the bonuses are taxed at source that is.
Must say I agree with you here………..If 50% is going straight into the Gov’t account they will be getting a big chunk of the dosh.
Gov’t banks, ‘cos the were crap, cannot expect massive bonuses across the board…. NO BONUS FOR FAILURE !!
Yeah. 50% of some bugger’s salary for Brown to piss up the wall.
”The obvious answer is to impose currency exchange controls ”
We’re not in the 1980′s anymore mate! They can move millions in less than a minute over the internet.
I had an email from a Nigerian this morning offering to help me do that. My boss at the bank told me “let’s give it a try”. Do you think I should?
Invest in Zimbabwe not Nigeria you’ll get more in return. Don’t report me for insider trading though you oik.
Actually it was the 70s.
And it was sarcastic (supposedly).
As has been said so many times before, the level of bonuses being paid is obscene – but this is a matter for the shareholders and not a bunch of icompetent ministerial control freaks. They are going to seriously damage our standing as a financial centre, thus doing the EU’s job for them.
If this wretched government thinks it’s a good idea then it certainly isn’t. More gesture politics which will cost us dear in the longer term.
B-b-b-b-but Labour REALLY likes that N. Korean lifestyle
we are the shareholders hugh.
Not all of the banks had to be bailed out.
Do the bonuses paid by HSBC, Barclays and any number of other banks who didn’t need public money to bail them out have anything to do with the Government?
but this is a matter for the shareholders
I have shares in several banks from tjhe de-mutualisation, and I have never been asked to vote on whether employees should get a bonus or how much.
This idea that shareholders should decide is pure nonsense. For a start, many of the shareholders are pension funds so the fund managers do not “own” the shares and are not shareholders.
We deserve to be taxed. We accept everything that this Government does. We are compliant. Give us X-Factor , Strictly, and Victory Gin we will be numb. We believe the Ministry of Truth. We believe that Co2 is evil. Our exhaled breath should be taxed.
See there! A good compliant comrade!
9.07am is not a good compliant comrade, they are a sex offender.
if you think they are good a good compliant comrade that means you are a sex offender too.
Thats it leave suckers I don’t care as long as I can tax you and if not you then the pip squeaks in the middle!
Hahaha
(Ally says its all going to be fine and I believe him)
Of course the Inland Revenue are tightening up the rules and regs on Non Doms…. used to be easy, just prove you were out of country and did not return for any more than 90 days in the that tax year…..you would then get any tax back for the whole period you were out of the country……
But now you basically have to sever all ties…. bunch of c*nts
I don’ t normally agree with you Guido but this looks like the most spectacular incident of cutting of our collective nose to spite our face in history.
Nobody likes the bankers – not even they do – but there’s no denying the fact that they’re our most productive sector in terms of generating wealth for society and taxes for the state. The departure of just 2000-3000 people from the City to Singapore, Zurich, New York, and (God forbid) Paris and Frankfurt will have an impact running into the then tens of billions – if not more – on GDP.
In 2-3 years time people will quickly realise that the sweet feeling of ‘justice’ they’re getting just now doesn’t pay the salaries of teachers, doctors, and policemen.
I suspect that the majority of those who think it would be justice are hard line communists like Brown and those who would vote Labour even if they were burning children at the stake. It defies all logic.
Keep taxes as they are and wait until the recovery for revenues to start flowing into the Treasury – but, of course, they know it is not going to happen.
I suggest rather than beating up a significant slice of your tax income, Broon and Co should be thinking up ways to create a more diverse economy which does not depend on one productive source.
Has anyone deducted the public sector tax take from the overall figures? After all public sector employees do not actually ‘pay’ tax -it’s an accounting nicety on a payslip. Paying it to the Treasury is simply a transfer within government accounts.
This would show what the economy is really generating
Oh I forgot,the client state members are being bred with no work ethic and a strong sense of entitlement, duly encouraged with the taxes of the dwindling band of hard working citizens. Not an ideal workforce
Green jobs is the answer. My colleague Mr Ballsed-Up and his colleagues have spent the last 12 years preparing school leavers for the challenge of becoming trees. That will be the culmination of our reducation policy. Unfortunately human trees do not consume Co2 as the old fashioned ones do and so we need to pursue our global carbon reduction plans to accommodate this. Joined up government is what we do. The tories though would do nothing.
the politics of envy are Labour’s stocking trade
Why should you be so surprised?
Unless of course the measures introduced do little of the things that they are suggesting in their spin
Tax the Bankers to the hilt I say.They have had it easy for far too long.
Don’t you mean “stock in trade” rather than stocking trade ?
Stocking trade sounds right to me, duckie.
Screw the banks & bankers. Protect depositor funds. Currency is Gov inteference with the free market. Let the banks go under. The strong survive & thrive.
If we had a absolute free market we wouldn’t be in this mess. Borrowing / lending distort the economy.
Introduce flat rate tax. Sorted.
It seemed that 10 men decided to have a business lunch once a week. They always met in the same restaurant and the bill was always, £100.00, for all 10 men. If each man was responsible for his share of the bill that would be, £10.00, each. The men decided to divide the bill based upon their ability to pay. Using an agreed upon formula the following payment arrangement was worked out based upon income.
Men 1-4 who made the least amount of money paid nothing.
Man 5 paid £ 1.00
Man 6 paid £ 3.00
Man 7 paid £ 7.00
Man 8 paid £12.00
Man 9 paid £18.00
Man 10 paid £59.00
After several weeks the owner of the restaurant told the men that because they were such good customers he was reducing the bill by £20.00. Their dilema was how to divide up the, £20.00. If each person got the same amount then the first 4 men would be getting money back but they never paid anything for the dinners. After much discussion and no resolve the owner offered the following suggestion which they all agreed to.
Original Payment/New Payment/£ Amount Saved/% Saved
Men 1-4 paid £ 0.00 £ 0.00 £0.00 0%
Man 5 paid £ 1.00 £ 0.00 £1.00 100%
Man 6 paid £ 3.00 £ 2.00 £1.00 33%
Man 7 paid £ 7.00 £ 5.00 £2.00 28%
Man 8 paid £12.00 £ 9.00 £3.00 25%
Man 9 paid £18.00 £14.00 £4.00 22%
Man 10 paid £59.00 £50.00 £9.00 15%
Once out side the men began to argue about the settlement. Man 5 said he only got, £1.00, while Man 10 received, £9.00. Men 1-4 were upset because the received nothing. They said that the cut only benefited the rich and the poor got nothing. They were so upset they beat up Man 10 and left him. The next week they met for lunch as usual except man 10 did not show up. When the new bill arrived the men discovered that between them they did not have enough money to pay even half of the bill.
Genius !
Seconded!
I am in favour of 15,000 tax free income and then a flat 35% across the board for everyone.
This would be leading into scrapping income tax altogether. It is a terrible 19th century invention that was supposed to be temporary.
Sorry, I don’t get it?
You never did….. I doubt a closet marxist would.
You’ve missed an essential point. I would pay men 1-7 £20 a week that I have printed in order to let them sit at home and watch TV. Then when election time comes I will tell them that if they want it to continue they must vote for me. When they do, I get a high paid job, a cushy pension, chauffeur driven jaguar and the chance to chase my crush obama through the kitchen. Everyone is a winner.
Certainly food for thought…
Blimey – this is EXACTLY the same question I got at my interview for a lavatory attendant job at Woking Railway Station last week.
I got the “Man 9″ calculations wrong by 0.0091% and so lost out to a bloke with a large blue bandage on his head and carrying a rocket launcher and an ammo belt. He starts the job in January after an intensive 23 day Health & Safety course.
So I am starting to lower my sights and have applied for a job as Prime Minister – evidently the job description is quite simple – you have to be a lying,fraudulent,manipulative,illiterate,cowardly,gurning,mincing nonentity.
So I have bought some black felt tip pens and am using my toes to write with.
Wish me luck.
You’ve got no chance. Your spelling is too good.
Can you curse everyone you meet and shut entire factories, merely by opening them?
This ain’t gonna work: for a start: how the fuck do you define a ‘banker’?.
Do you include retail bankers, insurance guys, non-financial treasury traders, merchant bankers?
And how do you tax a bonus that Labour have already said should be paid in stock, and deferred over several years? What’s the year 1 value of that little lot?
Not gonna fly.
Its not meant to work FFS ! Its a double con trick !
CON 1: Make the public believe you are getting rid of the deficit & debt by taking it ALL out of the bankers pockets.
CON 2: The idea is so half baked it will never work & the bankers know this but keep quite so the government can get away with Con 1 (see above)
OBJECTIVE: Do & say anything to keep hold of power – even ruin the country.
Good to see you back again,C-F.
Now we need to mobilise the fury into action.
They’re a mythical concept created for political soundbytes, just like ClimateChange and God.
Well I hope you’re right, but the ‘definition’ is all important isn’t it? Darling has to calculate that as well, and he’s simply not up to it.
This will rumble on without end. And, actually, the revenues will be miniscule. Right now the lawyers’ fees calculators are in melt-down. It’s the old money-go-round.
Gesture politics at its most inept. Oh, and any real calculations as to how much of our cash has been returned by Greedy MPs?
Bonuses incentivise, whatever industry from selling TV’s in Comet to City bankers. We are all signed up to income tax.
However, get a grip on tax avoidance.
The thing that galls is that many traders will have made huge bonuses on trading toxic assets before they became toxic debts. Bet they still got paid out.
Avoidance ain’t the problem. Evasion (partly) is . But government incompetence is certainly the root cause.
No dishonesty is the cause.We all have a moral obligation to pay tax so that we can enjoy services.Tax avoiders are the lowest of the low.
Bollocks. What ‘moral obligation’? Where is that enshrined in Statute? You obviously don’t understand the difference between avoidance and evasion.
If you want to get into a debate about morals, well bring it on.
What was that about Caesar and God?
Bullshit, if you want services, pay for them yourself, if you do not, you have no moral obligation to pay for them at all. If you choose to have no children that is entirely your choice, if however you decide to have ten children that is your choice too, just do not expect everyone else to pay for your choices. Simple.
But Brown is an economic genius who abolished boom and bust and then it was all spoiled by bankers who created the credit crunch and the national debt and the global warming so they need to be taxed.
If the Tories oppose Brown we’ll smear them as racist.
I saved the world !! We are best placed in this GLOBAL downturn !!
Brown doesn’t care of any long term damage he does. He doesn’t care about any short-term damage he does. This is just popululist, purely political grand-standing.
In the context of a 200bn quid deficit then 1bn quid in extra taxes – which may never materialise as folk either use loopholes or emigrate or simply quit – is not even a rounding error.
Even in the ‘boom’ years Brown was typically 10bn quid out in his borrowing requirements. 1bn quid ain’t going to change that.
More scorched earth from Brown. Chase away the high earners. Chase awy their jobs. Chase away their businesses. Make it even harder for an incoming government to balance the books.
Pure evil.
Not half as evil as what Brown has waiting for him when he suffers Election Death.
But 30% of people are saying they would vote for him, this is feeding this bunch of wasters in to thinking they have a chance; what we need is clear evidence they are in for a good kicking at the election. Today is not going to be a good day.
Of the 30% who would, apparently, vote for Brown I can sort of understand the feckless, couldn’t-give-a-monkey’s, benefit scroungers doing so.
What’s much more difficult to understand is that after all that has gone on during the past 12 years so many of the right-on faux-socialist chatterers, Islington set, BBC, and the like seem bent on fleshing out the figures to make that 30%.
Is the Government quietly leaving the pollsters to get on with their job without any interference?
Or is Mandelson on the phone every day whispering in their ear?
Has Darling produced his PBR in isolation, or has he been on the phone to the ratings agencies every day to clarify what he can get away with?
Time will tell on both counts.
The only convincing reason for nobbling the polls would be to facilitate electoral fraud on a huge scale. It isn’t paranoid to regard that as a possibility.
That 30% is largely made up of the publicly funded workers whose unions will be telling them to vote labour on the election or be made redundant the week after.
What the unions are not telling them is that even if labour do win, (due to a massive drop-off in the tory vote as many tories stay at home or vote UKIP in disgust at the treason that BOTH parties have colluded in), that on waking up to a newly elected labour government, they will STILL be made redundant anyway as the measures announced by Alistair Darling today will not be anywhere near sufficient to stop the haemorrhage of our money.
Producers make money, they don’t save money by not producing!
I am amazed how many cannot see the difference.
However without incentives to produce, producers don’t try so hard..why should they.
100% of bugger all is BUGGER ALL!
When Darling sits down having made his bollocks speech this afternoon,Osborne should simply stand up and say;
“Mr Speaker,we have nothing to say to the mendacious proposals made today by this government of over 12 years.
We know that the British people realise they have been ripped off by the Labour Party and like the British electorate,we call for a General Election in January – thank you”.
They do not need to bother arguing about the scale or speed of cuts/savings/made up numbers – just ignore Labour’s bollocks and call for a General Election.
May be a pipedream but I agree.
Have no part with their bitter, nasty Socialist schemes.
Why don’t people who went to secondary modern schools call themselves secondary modern ex pupil.
Very few members of parliament would support it. Most of them know they have a few months to pinch every pencil, memo pad, overnight allowance, perk, city contact, directorship, resettle their family employees, sort out their quango post, EU appointment, settle old scores, poison the well for successors and plan out their memoirs. Fucking parasites – all but a handful!
And I suppose at Westminster,they have one of those Deli ticket counters to form an orderly queue to get their “palms” read by Long Tall Sally B.
Let them go, there will be plenty of people wanting their jobs.
Bankers do not work in the UK because it has a low-tax regime, it’s true, but this Government’s fiscal bulimia and financial diaorrhea harms us all. Their aim seems to be that the only high-earners left in the UK work in state sinecures, where they can be controlled.
Excuse me Sir William, but Gordon Brown was appalled when he discovered that there are public sector employees (including ‘freelancers’ using their own companies as a device to minimise tax) who are paid >£200K pa. His indignation on behalf of hard-working families does him the greatest credit. I am sure he will spare no effort to discover who it is that allowed this state of affairs to develop.
lol i bet he will….13 years later
Well worth reading, Gordon’s minder – Mandy, loves Socialism the rest of us can’t affprd it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-1231313/PETER-OBORNE-Mandelson-shows-Labour-party-rotten-decadence.html
Alas, very fewer Chancellors have any grasp of tax policy, or any curiosity about it. Our tax system is like a stereotypical teenager’s bedroom, a record of past enthusiasms. Chancellors find something shiny, attractive and expensive, play with it for a while and then leave it lying about for others to trip over. Nothing is ever thrown away unless it needs to be kept. It’s untidy, costly, ugly and repllent.
You’ve obviously been looking under MY bed,eh?
I’ve heard it said that the Tax Manual was about 1″ thick in 1997, and is now a two-volume chunk totalling about 3″ thick. Even HMRC struggle to interpret it, apparently. A damn good clean-up and rationalisation seems due.
For my sins i (used to?) work in tax. In 1997 Butterworths and CCH published two volume sets of legislation, mostly direct taxes in one and VAT/indirect taxes (& Inheritance tax + statutory instruments etc) in the other. Cost – perhaps £30 per volume.
Now – CCH publishes a 8 part set for £350 http://www.taxguidesdirect.co.uk/index.asp?search=bic&bic=AATGD07&t=RED+%26+GREEN+BOOKS . Maybe that will illustrate the explosion of tax legislation since Labour came to power.
Also, FWIW in September I attended a dinner addressed by the head of one of the professional institutes devoted to tax. He acknowledged how much legislation practitioners were expected to know, but asked us to look on the bright side… in 10 years there would be twice as much to learn!
I thought the mass exodus was going to be to Dubai?
The bankers are bluffing.
We’ll see. Time and money is on their side.
They aren’t bluffing. Many have gone already.
Bob Diamond has already relocated to New York for example.
Diamond earns £20M per year – do the sums on “I Resign.com” with their salary calculator;
AFTER TAX/NI deductions;
£32,346 per DAY
£227,044 per week
£983,859 per month
So when you start earning that much money,what will ANOTHER £10M do to incentivise you? Nothing – it’s all about the thrill of the deal and having POWER.
When its all accounted for in New York – how much do you think the UK revenue will receive?
Not to mention the taxes on all his support staff and other “head office” functions that will go with him….
Perhaps you should go away and do the sums my little friend.
Oh and HSBC is already moving its head office to Hong Kong….. wonder how much that will cost in UK taxes?
They can take their red figures somewhere else!
Let someone else buy their bullshit, ok so you make a few quid in Year 1 but you’ll be left picking up the tab further down the line.
Our Financial Services sector has proven to be a poor long term investment.
Time for someone else to get fleeced!
Bullshitters!
No they are not bluffing. My sister’s interior design business has already lost a potential customer (a banker) who is going to be based in Hong Kong in the New Year.
No point in getting your Eaton Square apartment done up if you’re letting it.
Don’t know about you but the discussion of Bankers’ bonus payments has never been mentioned apart from the Labour scorched Earth dreams.
Does anyone actually think that it will make a fly’s fart worth of difference?
This shower of shit will be consigned to the sketch book of history very soon as will their fiscal lunacy. Hopefully the Labour Party, thanks to Brown, will be finally destroyed as a potential political force.
What a mess to clean up; Brown deserves to be publicly pilloried and villified for the damage his bitter, self-deluded ambition has done to the country.
I spend my waking hours hating the man!
Gordon Brown = worst Prime Minister ever.
AND Chancellor.
Perversely, if he does succeed in destroying the Labour party (as most sensible people hope) then it may have all been worth it. Still, its a hell of a price to pay for generations to come.
I truly worship the ground that’s coming to him.
I want to personally pull the lever and hear his fat neck snap and his bong eye pop out of its socket.
45
Granmmar School Boy says:
I could have written that myself – I think that hating the fuckers so much is giving me an ulcer..
I don’t know a single person who doesn’t loath Brown more than anything else in the world. And I’m in Manchester which used to be solid Labour.
I imagine the same is true almost everywhere else where labout where once strong. Not only have Nu Labour betrayed the nation with their treachery they have especially betrayed those traditional labour supporters, the working man(or woman) who believed that the Labour party represented their interests.
Its the deceit and lies that makes the hatred so bitter, the utter self serving, money and power grabbing at our expense treachery.
1992 was the first election I could vote in and i was shocked and dismayed that the Tories got back in. I voted Labour in 1997 hoping for genuine change (voted tory in 2005!). I feel fucking cheated and lied to. Grr
Whilst I truly hope that they are savaged at the next election, i cant help but feel that the pleasure that will bring will be more than outweighed by the betrayal of the british people by the Blair/Brown labout government.
Sadly, almost the entire existing political class are disingenuous, sloganeering hypocrites.
A quick look back in recent history shows the deciet for what it is. Bliar infamously anti EU until he decided to switch track and oppose the tory ( feeble ) sceptisism. He also campaigned against the tories planned introduction of I.D. cards, until he gained office and discovered the “war against terrorism” that he was largely, personally resposible for creating in the first place, then of course they became “essential”.
When they were last in office, the tories were all in favour of I.D. cards now they pretend that they are abhorent. The list from immigration, the EU, personal freedom, I.D. cards, the destruction of parliamentary democracy, civil liberties, trail by jury, is consistant, even the mood music is the same, change, change, change, except of course nothing does, unless by change, change, change, you actually mean worse, worse, worse.
Vote Bliar get Brown, vote Cameron, get Bliar mk2, the roundabout goes around, everything “changes” and everything never really does change. Like a ship sailing to a secretly predetermined harbour, the crew, whoever they are, just change the speed of the ship, not the planned destination, no matter how much the passengers complain that it is not where they want or were told on embarcation, it would go.
The reason of course is simple, like “climate change”, the entire charade is fabricated nonsense, real power has gone elsewhere, the ruling elites have been totally complicit in the destruction of real democracy and its replacement with real corporatist fascism.
To them it is of no importance, little people are regarded as not capable of understanding issues, of being bothersome and awkward, best remove them from the equation and leave the important decisions to important people.
So the tyranny of an unacountable elite, was gently placed upon us all, for our own benefit of course and for the wider good. Such is our fate, while the important people decide how to classify something essential for all life on Earth as a harmful pollutant and remove previously inalienable rights to proper democratic accountablity and representation, free speech, the right to travel or improve your life.
The little people look on and are largely ignored.
Don’t spend your wanking hours on him!
I hate him for making me hate him. I don’t want to be like a bitter hatefilled leftie that you get but that’s what he is doing.
The bastard gets off on it too, I bet.
I am a very bitter mid ’40′s man,unemployed for the first time in 25 yrs in 2007 when this Soviet spy became the unelected “Prime” Minister.
I am bitter because this c*unt has ruined my country and my kids future.
If I could do Brown great harm I would do it.
And you are all correct – mention the name Brown anywhere you go and every single person nearly vomits with the hatred they have for this vile man.
And the most galling aspect is that the person who actually controls when he is eventually finished is the very man himself – it is crazy that Brown has the say on when there is a General Election.
This is a nightmare.
Not everyone mate. Polling suggests getting on a third of people will still vote labour. Cash back!
If I saw him getting a kicking of some youths in the street I would be straight over to stomp on the fukkas ugly fat fucking face.
I could rip his heart out with my bare hands
Does anyone like him? Even his closest allies. He does not have a single redeeming feature.
I hated Blair but at least you didn’t feel completely embarassed when you saw him representing you country. What do the other Leaders think of him – ‘quick hide, that moron’s coming’
Top rate of tax was 98% in the 60s? If Labour stay in it will be back to the future some more.
I think that the highest rate (when Woy Jenkins was Chancellor) was 138%
Andy Burnham died live on air this morning on Radio 4. Rarely have I heard a more pathetic performance from a minister. All he could do was keep wittering about ‘nasty Tories, nasty Tories’.
The Today presenter was embarrased while mild-mannered Tory Andrew Lansley, ripped the piss out of Burnham.
Burnham was so bad it was farcical.
A worthy successor to Brown then.
The Toady crowd must have been following strict instructions from the Lord Poo Bah methinks.
Can’t find this link on the Today website…….. has it been edited out. More bias from the Beeb?
For some reason ALL Todays in the past week have disappeared from the iPlayer page – but it is possible to listen to the entire 3 hour program on the Today home page.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00p4jw5
at 2hrs 10 minutes in
sorry, correction, that’s when Peston is on doing the pre-pre-budget report
Wow ! Guido !
You mentioned “the Looters”. Pure Ayn Rand-speak. Well done!
Oh, but that is precisely where we are at (if I am allowed an Americanism).
Yes, I noticed that too.
I wonder if any Labour MP has bothered to read it. Brown? Darling?
Dave should make it compulsory reading for all Tory MPs, if they haven’t alredy read it.
By “it” I mean Atlas Shrugged.
It reads like a satire of our present day situation, although it was written in the ’50s. I can even picture our PM standing up in Parliament to announce an ‘Anti Dog Eat Dog Act’, because it is the right thing to do.
If there’s a lack of reality in this afternoon’s PBR then it won’t be long before we see a run on the pound and a gilt buyer’s strike.
It’s only the belief that there’ll be a Tory landslide and that they’ll start slashing public expenditure that is preventing the financial markets from ripping Britain a new arsehole.
I really hope we get a hung Parliament next year and that the Lib Dems and Labour form a coalition government. I can’t wait to see the faces of the igorant, fucking, celebrity-worshipping, shopping-mad, British public when the shit hits the fan, the pound goes into meldown, gilt buyers stop buying, interest rates shoot up, and we are forced to go to the IMF.
Much as I would like to see that vision myself I find that through inertia, lack of urgency, whatever I have not yet left the UK so I will be caught up in the food riots and anarchy.
And so what I want is for Labour to do the right thing for once in their life, take the tough decisions, spell out what needs to be done and then get on with fucking well doing it. But the yellow dogs wont. They’ll march us six more months into financial hell which will take several years to undo even an additional six months of this idiocy. And they’ll do all this knowing full well the damage they’re doing to the country but they’ll put that to one side and consider that it is a price worth paying just so that they can continue as a political force.
Pure evil.
Several years? Several decades more like.
Personaly I can’t wait to see the dismantling of McBust’s client state. It is long overdue. We have to get back to small efficient and cost-effective government, not the bureaucratic interfering unaffordable control-freakery we currently have to endure.
bashing bankers? lynch the fucking scum.
However stupid Vince Cable’s “mansion tax” might be, moving from income-based taxation to a property-based system would be a good idea.
30 years ago, the large majority of people had one income stream – what their employer paid them. Nowadays, “income” is harder to pin down than a soapy frog, and even the moderately high earners avoid paying tax on most of it.
Property, on the other hand, can’t be offshored, and can be quite easily and fairly valued. If you want to live and work in this country, then you pay tax on the property you live in – no need to worry about domicility or any other gubbins.
Of course, people will bleat about the “pensioner couple who’ve worked hard all their lives” geing “forced out of their family home.” Well, is that a three-bedroom home, with two bedrooms spending 90% of the year empty? If the same couple cooked dinner for four every day, then threw two platefuls away, people would be appalled at the waste. It’s a free country, and people should have the right to have empty rooms in their house for the occasional family vists, but the country should have the right to tax them for it.
Your tax suggestion means that private property is effectively stolen by the state and then rented back to their former legal owners.
That is not taxation – that is Stalinism.
It’s the right thing to do.
Complete bollocks. Your personal wealth is taxed based on the property you own. That tax goes (nominally) to providing infrastructure for you and your property, and defending it from invaders.
How is that theft, except in the mind of the most juvenile of student politicians?
The whole point of a property tax is that the only way to pay less is to live in a shitty house. If you really hate the government that much, then fair play to you. Personally, I’d be happy to pay a rate of tax which accurately reflects my standard of living, as opposed to my level of income (which are entirely different things)
Defending it from invaders? We haven’t seen a policeman or police car in our part of the world for over a year.
Infrastructure? We paid for it ourselves when we (self) built the place including paying £16 for the electricity to be undergrounded. The only ‘infrastructure’ provided by the state are the dustman for which we pay £2,590 a year in Council Tax.
You should take a look at the 1909 People’s Budget (http://www.liberalhistory.org.uk/item_single.php?item_id=46&item=history)… it decimated employment in the countryside and forced local trade into the towns resulting in slums and 10 people to a room.
The 1909 People’s Budget? What a great example, especially since the land tax within it was never implemented, because the Tory/Unionist upper house refused to let it pass until the land tax was dropped.
And that refusal by the Lords’ led directly to the Parliament Act, subsequently abused by New Labour to force through all sorts of injudicious crap.
Think it can’t be offshored ? I’ll fucking sell up and move if this happens.
Why sell up?
– Convert your property into as many squalid bedsits as you can.
– Charge over the market rate to your local council to house benefits claimants.
– Divert the money through a Manx holding company to your bank account in Dubai.
– Live off the tax-free cash via a Visa card in a nice big place on the Croatian coast.
couldn’t agree more Bullshit Fawker. taxing the wealth creators will drive me off shore to the Caymans.
I’ll be off to Brussels next year as well.
Now if more people followed my example we would all be better off
It’s astounding how generous people can be at this time of year. Just today I walked by a young scantily clad girl sitting on a street corner, braving our harsh December weather.
To be honest she looked like she could do with some food and maybe a few extra layers of clothes, but to my surprise she held up a polystyrene cup and proceeded to offer me some of the money it contained.
“Some change?” she asked.
“Why thank you!” I replied as I took the cup from her. What a delightful young woman
I’LL TAKE THAT !!
I’ll call it my Polystyrene Cup Charge.
Brown would have thrown his Nokia at her.
The BBC is a hoot. Loads of wankers from Liverpool ringing up demanding more benefits. GET A FUCKING JOB YOU BONE IDLE SCOUSE SHITS!
It has been speculated this morning that the chancer will put a tax on bankers receiving a bonus of over £10,000. The current speculation seems to be focused on the bankers who make huge contributions to our economy. I was wondering is this same tax will be levied on those public servants.
Speccie article on public sector bonuses http://tinyurl.com/ye2h24q
There are a lot of people earning huge amounts of money eg, so called celebs and footballers, why not put some focus on them? The whole country is transfixed on strictly and x factor, which contributes what in terms of the means of production? Fills the coffers of the few at the expense of the many as ever.
Yes, strange isn’t it? For NuLiebour these are generally the untouchables.
However, please exclude me from ‘the whole country’ as I would rather eat my own liver with a rusty spoon than watch X Factor, or any of the other talent(less) shows.
The bankers can fuck right off – all their money is skimmed off global Industrial activity
“Cultured people are merely the glittering scum which floats upon the deep river of production” – Winston Churchill
Yes, and the tax generated from them pays for all your types who are non productive, non incoming producing and have an opinion on everything with little knowledge on anything.
Go and do us a favour and consult your health and safety book, then read your manual on political correctness.
Too late! I left 4 years ago when the writing was well and truly on the wall – now living a life of bliss in Godzone (NZ). In truth I thought it was going to get bad but what Brown and co have done, and intend to keep doing, is pure madness.
My list of where to go is
1. Zeland Newydd
2. New Hampshire
3. South Africa
Any other ideas.
If you can afford it, buy your own Hebride. Just a small one – I think the big ones have been taken. A bit windy and wet on occasions, but potentially lots of free venison and the romance of peat fires. You could even delcare UDI.
That c*unt Darling is up in the Hebrides – nice lonely location,no one to hear him SCREAM!
Poor Hebrides. Did anyone warn them?
Or violent revolution
i know that RBS has already lost a number of successful traders who relocated to Switzerland. I have a number of clients who have already relocated and know of others who are looking at it. I have a client in a large private equity LLP, most of the members are non UK Domiciliaries, most of the deals are pan-European and the whole firm is looking at relocating to Switzerland: they had a full presentation on it last week. Whilst things were left alone these people were happy to live here but they don’t have to be here. Big issues in addition to the actual tax burden is the hassle of dealing with HMRC, the intrusive manner in which they carry out their task and the lack of certainty as how one is going to be taxed. These people are highly intelligent, organised, proactive types; to leave such a large part of their affairs totally and utterly beyond their control doesn’t fit with their nature.
And no matter that it may be a ‘one-off’ tax the principle is established. Anytime one of the major political parties is looking for a whipping boy for their own economic incompetence they’re going to come a-looting.
It’s why there is no financial centre to speak of in Paris. Because the French are prone to revolution and ‘redistribution’ even if they haven’t done it for over 100 years everybody knows that’s just the sort of thing they would do.
Brown is going to do that to the UK. Actually, he already has. Just mooting the idea as a political point is enough to start thousands of high earners and high-net worth individuals consulting their tax-advisors and their atlas.
The Commercial property sector is another bomb waiting to go off, accelerated if there vacany offices in the City
I thought it had already gone off. Down 50% isn’t it? Just as house prices would be down by 50% if Brown hadn’t slashed interest rates to enable folk to stay in their insanely over-priced, shoddily built, 12-to-the-acre, ‘Executive Homes’.
Well that and to allow him to borrow and additional 200bn quid a year as cheaply as possible. And you don’t get cheaper than printing it yourself.
Which other sectors will be left to generate growth?
Given that the financial services sector had been generating growth in the last 20 years or so, and the banking industry is crippled either by its own mistakes, regulation, levies for reinsurance or taxes, what is left to push the UK close to the trend rate of 2.5%?
And the EU is trying to find new ways of adding additional burdens on the remaining financial sector.
Gender diversity enforcement programmes do not provide sufficent economic growth. As long as we have a bunch of over promoted, jumped up ex student union Trots, ex Communists and thick unionists the UK will be run into the ground. Simples.
The biggest growth sector will be in the field of psychiatry and counselling – millions of Brits queuing to have their worries about their ruined future treated.
Don’t tell me,Brown is going to become a non- exec director for the Samaritans and they will start charging premium rates for the phone calls.
I can picture the scene;
Saturday 1am;
‘Hello,is that The Samaritans?” a distraught voice wimpers from the phone box
Scottish voice replies;
“Yes,please give me your credit card details and then I shall transfer you to our experts in Delhi – can we also interest you in a 110% loan from the Royal Busted Bank of Scotland?”
Distraught person hangs themselves with the phone cord.
If that Commie Darling is too penal, I will be logging onto you Guido from Suisse.
These spiteful, mean spirited, illogical, warped, venal, stupid, vengeful, short sighted morons are going to have an island tearing itself apart with high unemployment full of uneducated immigrants from all corners of the world contributing nothing to themselves, their neighbourhoods or the country.
Seems like 1972 all over again when I was 11. Oh how I remember it well with my family threatening to flee to Canada. Wish they had.
Do you want a contribution to get that ticket to the land of yodelling?
Well if you want to buy Guido a fourth home…
He’ll be getting an annual contribution in the form of a 45% tax saving. He won’t need any additional funds from us.
Really?
Under Ted Heath my wages were decent. When Sunny Jim got in, it all went wrong. Big time.
Banker CEO to bankers ” Dont’ worry lads, no bonus this year but double next when this lot are history”
Crude, stupid and will appeal to crude stupid
people who are crude and thick and stupid
or bought and paid for.
OT Knowing how creative Guido’s readers are – Mr Delingpole is looking for poems about Al Gore
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100019364/climategate-the-inaugural-al-gore-prize-poetry-competition/
Guido seems to have a quaint idea that thesebankers are irreplaceable. They are not. It is well known in the City that the top jobs are an “old boys club” that is there are born to that position. For generations these positions have been jealously guarded for the other people in the club. If some of them pissed off it would open up the jobs to people with real talent. This action may well be the making of the City as the incapable self select themselves for retirement.
You know fuck all. The old boys club disappeared in the 80s.
ah, the old boys network handed over the reigns to the barrow boys and just disappeared like a puff of smoke?
that is the most fucking stupid comment you have ever published Guido.
you’re losing the plot.
lucky I am here to keep you on track, innit.
‘Reigns’
Another State Education Victim.
Are you trying to get an ASBO, TaT?
I am going the right way about it, aren’t I.
Arse of the Day Award for you.
And its not even 11am.
and the rimmer of the day award goes to you Dr. Stalin.
any chance of a soapy titwank after you have finished rimming Guido?
Where do we think we’ll be in 2 – 3 years? If we’re still trying to control bankers’ remuneration – we’d just as well all give up now!
1. ‘Bankers’ got us into this mess and ‘Bankers’ will get us out of it !
2. The Banks have been rescued with Public Money and are now back to doing what they do best – Making Money – with both Shares and Pension funds up
3. No other UK commercial activity can generate as much profit and as quickly as Banking
4. We need UK Banks to be profitable
5. We need UK ‘dealers’ to be competitively rewarded
6. What a ‘dealer’ takes home at the end of a year is not the problem
7. It’s the type of risky deals he does on a day-to-day basis that needs watching
8. We now own the Banks and it is now “our Profit”!
9. Brown & Darling were previously very happy to receive all the associated tax revenues
10. If they want to help put right their grossly incompetent mismanagement of the UK’s finances they must swallow hard and again support ‘Banking’ and all that this entails
The reason we are ‘LAST OUT’ of recession is because we have been more dependent (proportionately) on the BANKING & FINANCE SECTOR than other countries – we naturally took a bigger (predictable) hit!
It’s time everybody understood this and GOT REAL !!!
Vince ‘the’ Cable, etc are just playing Politics – this is irresponsible, selfish and wrong !!
A back door EU agreement sometime ago said – GB has Financial Services etc – France has Agriculture etc – Germany has manufacturing etc etc etc
Financial Services ? – it’s all we’ve got !
Noted.
The problem was the greedy ones going for bonuses on un-regulated products that they had no idea about. Most people would if allowed
I don’t see the problem of taxing the dicks at RBS/HBOS but i say leave Barclays and those that aren’t 60% + owned by the tax payer
Good idead the best of them will go and work for Barclays leaving the dross to look after our interests.
The teeny problem with that is that if you target RBS/HBOS then the good people will leave and you’ll be left with the not-so-good people. This is a problem because we now own those companies and we want them to turn a buck asap so that they can pay all that money back and get off the tax-payers teat.
If you marginalise them then you’ll be left with the ones who couldn’t get a job anywhere else and they’ll be sullen and slovenly and unproductive just like British Leyland of old. We need to get these fuckers off the state teat asap otherwise we’re just storing up another NCB, BL, BT, BG jobs-for-the-boys disaster.
Actually I should say that many if not all of the good people have already left HBOS/RBS. Nobody who has spent a lifetime working in private industry and who had any ounce of pride would hang around to be a welfare case supported by the public.
THAT’S MY BOYS !!!
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article6949431.ece
No more guns to Afghanistan. We need them all to shoot ourselves in the feet.
When you look Madelson and realise what man has become it is clear that we should let mankind die out with relative dignaty and hope that something better replaces it.
So don’t rely on people you meet
Cause no-one is safe in these streets
Gay Fucker, you a fat banker?
I was under the impression that this fiscal morass was down to New Labours sheer incompetence & the fact that these fat cat socialists have never run a business or created any wealth – other than the interest their parents estates afford them.
Now I am not so sure.
The new Labour Government is full of recycled marxists & student activist socialists & communisrs.
What do these redundant & mroally bankrupt left wing political movements have in common?
THE EQUAL SHARING OF MISERY (for us not them).
The naive politico 6th form student that lurks in all of the New Labour front bench would be so proud of their achievements – wrecking the economy, the currency & ensuring that future generations are subjected to the abject misery of enforced socialsim & the sharing of misery for decades to come.
The New Labour champagne socialist fat cats want shooting, they really do.
A mate of mine works for a firm of lawyers that advises people on moving out of the UK ( mostly to Switzerland ). They are rushed of their feet.
I’m not sure they will be able to cope if Labours budget for the one (Gordon Brown) goes through.
They’ll have to take a man on!
You’d have thought, given the country’s dire financial situation, that now is the time to stimulate all parts of the economy, and certainly not to introduce measures that will stifle any part. Kicking ‘bankers’ might give the unthinking a brief sense of shadenfreude, but if it damages the financial sector’s ability to compete with overseas rivals, it’s an own goal.
Germany (I think) is already cutting taxes to stimulate their economy. Britain probably can’t, much, at the moment. But until we have a government that encourages enterprise of all types – financial, manufacturing, services, the lot – we’re going to struggle. Above all, of course, government has to stop spending more than it earns as soon as possible.
But strangling wealth-creators now is destroying future tax-take. Government by lunacy. Sadly, we’re all too used to it.
top boy is a political genius but even he finds it difficult to understand why the people here who are on average salaries are defending the millionaire bankers greed and dishonesty.
you are rather like rape victims who go to court to offer a glowing character reference for your rapist.
you lot sound like a bunch of brainswashed moonies.
the financial sector is totally reliant on taxpayers money and therefore he who pays the piper calls the tune, innit.
you seem very concerned about the bankers fleeing the country to evade their tax contributions. where will they go?
wherever they do scurry to, will it be as great a country as this? ofcourse not.
think of it as a transportation scenario like when we sent the convicts to Australia except the bankers are choosing to cut and run and are doing it at their own expense and loss of quality of life.
THE BANKERS ARE CUTTING AND RUNNING FUCKING TURNCOAT BASTARDS.
top boy is a political genius
errrrr sure whatever.
You wouldn’t mean that thriving and rich nation Australia would you?
Stay in the burnout UK or move to OZ hmmmm let me think.
Not a hard choice is it.
bye then.
I am a political genius but you do not have the intelligence to address any of my points.
conservativefoam would be a much more suitable venue for a spastic like you.
I don’t need to address your infantile points because they speak for themselves and have little relevance to the situation.
You can only fool people some of the time mah boi!
Why are so many people leaving the country in record numbers? Can’t all be bankers or the rich.
ah, so now you are changing your argument.
and you have also addressed, albeit in an underhanded manner, one of my ‘infantile’ points.
DOH!
you cretin.
“On Average salaries?” Sorry to hear that TAT!
I was not talking about myself, I was talking about average people like you.
what i find annoying is the people against taxing them are the same people against regulating them
if you allowed us to regulate them during 2000-2007 we wouldn’t need to tax them!
S’cuse me. I think you’ll find the people for taxing ‘em are the ones who destroyed the regulator in 1997. Then bragged about it for years and now that Ben Bernanke has pointed out how spectacularly they fucked up they’re looking to blame any c-unt but themselves.
Well said Jgm2.
No need to panic we’ll just follow the socialists hypocrisy and set up charities (money laundries )
The importance os speculative banking to the UK economy is often exaggerated. Most of the activity attributed to the ‘financial sector’ actually consists of mainstream, high-street banking and insurance, the law, accountancy and other services that are likely to trundle on regardless after Gordon Gecko has buggered off to Switzerland.
Once the Canary Wharf banks relocate their international finance units abroad then a large number of the accountants etc you refer to will be let go. I don’t think that anyone has yet said that _everything_ financial will move overseas… but whatever’s left will be increasingly regulated (think bank overdraft etc charges) and compelled to try to survive on thinner and thinner margins off a domestic population with less and less money.
All the income generators who service offshore clients (eg international lawyers, accountants, bankers etc) can go offshore to avoid punitive taxes on their income and profits (and transaction taxes on their clients’ capital) – the big losers will be HMRC.
If you want to envisage the banking sector after the high earners have left, think of the clueless scum who (used to?) man the counters of building societies on Saturday mornings.
the banks should have been allowed to go bust………businesses go bust every single day…….instead of giving adam applegarth a pay off of £60,000 a MONTH he should be prosecuted for fraud!
gordon set up the famous regulatory system.but is too arrogant (and too thick) to understand that the finance industry has and will continue to run rings round him……….any experience of working in the city gordie? er..no……….
as for the class war…………wasnt it gordie that asked his ‘friend’ Sir victor blank to rescue hbos? so one day its ok to mix with the toffs and another to pretend you are with ‘the people’?????????
the govt. has given free money to the banks……..so it is bleedin obvious that they are going to buy ‘assets’ with it………even if they simply buy bonds then they make money from positive carry…….so why are expecting the banks to suddenly become altruistic and lend money to ‘save’ the economy?
gordie is totally clueless with ZERO experience of banking or business……..
but the uk citizens are the ones that will pay for many years for his ego games and delusions.
the trouble is that there is no accountability in the uk any more……….
and the dynamic duo will keeeep on pissing YOUR MONEY DOWN THE DRAIN WHILE LINING THEIR OWN NESTS……gordon and badger will NEVER have to pay any money back……….attacking ‘greedy bankers’ while stealing 5 homes just stinks alastair!!!!!!!!!!why isnt he being prosecuted?
Brown shat on his ‘friend’ Victor Bland by encouraging a merger between a solvent Lloyds and HBOS. This has resulted in no benefit for Lloyds shareholders – in fact a 90% trashing of their investment but now Brown gets to claim that he’s saved ‘The Banks’ rather than using English taxpayers money to save just the Scottish Banks.
Which were the only ones that needed saving. Gotta keep those jobs in all those Labour constituencies lads.
It’s all politics with that c-unt.
Bland by name Bland by nature our old Vic is.
Right. So, we have to spend £850bn bailing out the banks and you still think they’re productive? City AM reckons that the financial sector contributed £61bn in tax last year. If right, that means that the bailout wiped out all of the tax revenues we’d received from the financial sector since 1995.
Doesn’t sound that productive to me. Perhaps, like Iceland, our financial sector is too big for the good of the country.
Jeeeesus. Another one falls for it. That 850bn quid is a worst-case scenario where every singl investment, property and mortgage becomes worth zero.
It’s the equivilent of expecting an insurance company to take a 100% loss on every household insurance it writes.
It’s like an insurance company insuring your 500,000 house against fire for 1,000 and then claiming they’re supporting you to the tune of half a million quid. Individually that may be true but collectively they’re unlikely for everybodies house to burn down simultaneously.
Same with that 850bn quid figure. That figure hasbeen painfully manufactured by double-counting and allsorts to push it just over the national debt – the real national debt that Labour has actually accumulated.
It’s mmore lies and disinformation from the most evil government since Cromwell.
The ‘Curse of Brown’ isn’t just amusing conceit, you know. Followed by floods, dogged by disaster, it is only a matter of time before the old gods of these islands claim those who summoned, usurped and misused their power: these signs are merely preliminaries to the greater feast to come. Their thirteen years Earthly bargain is nearly done: there will be portents, whales stranded near Westminster, outbreaks of raven flu, statues struck by lightning, wonders and monstrosities, structural trouble with the Channel tunnel… and finally they will be taken, to huge public relief, in the midst of a great gale.
Mandelson’s chicken shall, indeed, return to roost.
Wrong.
The “bail-out” has cost nothing like this much, most of this amount can be attributed to guarantees for which no money has changed hands.
The tax-payer’s equity stake in the banks will generate a huge profit for the Treasury (provided the Adams Family doesn’t succeed in destroying them first).
It is the treasury that needs bailing out BY US, to the tune of one trillion pounds.
Labour’s spin machine has been working overtime to conflate the recapitalisation of the banks with the hundreds of billions brown has pissed up the wall on your behalf.
Don’t be such a sucker.
Gordon hates you and he’s going to make you pay.
They didn’t teach Aesop at Loretto.
The banks contributed 25% of our tax.
Now that the Adams Family have fucked up the economy and killed the golden-egg-laying goose, who do you think they will ask to pay the taxes they need to bail them out?
“Spite and Stupidity: they’re in mah D.N.A.”
Lot of anger here today.
Have a nasty feeling they will be let off the hook though.
Lies, spin, fiddled figures, spin, platitudes, doing the right thing, investment, nasty tories etc etc etc.
BBC analysis – well done we’re on the right track with Labour
It will wash over the majority of the public, especially the core Labour vote, as though nothing has happened.
Only me coming might wake up the majority of the population, but even that is stretching it.
Sadly true. Probably about 80% of the population either don’t know, or don’t care that we have the economic problems that we do. As long as they can float along in their own little bubbles, they’re happy. Not sure how that can be overcome.
Blair and Brown and their ‘head nodding’, ‘because you know it’s the right thing to do’, soundbite acolytes have ruined the UK economy.
They inherited a growing economy from the Tories. That inheritance has been utterly trashed.
As ever, the taxpayer has to ride to the rescue of yet another socialist inspired economic meltdown.
Blair was piss and wind.
Brown is quite simply the worst Chancellor and PM (unelected) this country has ever had.
As for the rest, there is nothing to say except that when people like Jacqui Smith become Home Secretary you know just how low the country has sunk.
There is no point waiting until next May for an election.
Go to the country now and kick this bunch of idiots into touch.
if we hanged a couple of dozen bankers then the rest would stop whingeing about paying their way.
let’s start with this c’unt diamond.
Ahh, the chinese way! I approve of this message.
Sorry to have to say this Guido, but the bankers are the looters fleecing the productive. This is what happens when your industry becomes a ward of the state as the financial system has become due to its own incompetence and inability to manage risk properly.
Speaking as a finance / investment specialist with many years’ experience and proven wealth generating methodologies – to me the solution to our dire straits is obvious:
The govt / banks develop a ‘double or quits’ financial instrument in which we put half of the nations borrowed cash on an overnight deal that will have the net effect of halving halving the nations debt – if we lose our shirt on this deal – we borrow / fund the ‘other half’ and repeat the exercise – sooner or later we will get lucky!
Problem solved!
You heard it here first !!
You see – even my lucky number – 200 – has struck again !!
Let’s do it !
You are Ed Balls, and I claim my £5 plus expenses.
if the banking industry was like real productive industries then banks would be allowed to fail. But banks are not allowed to fail because they are too big and letting one fail brings down everyone else. The bankers know this and plan to take full advantage of it by looting at every possible opportunity.
You can not capitalism without people being allowed to fail as well as succeed. That is socialism.
We are heading for a corporatist dystopia.
TAT said ‘guido ripped off bob marley with taxodus’……………..
i havent laughed so much in years!
thick thick thick!
top boy has clearly won the debate as all the pro banker stooges and trolls have run away.
fucking cowards.
come back and get your skulls smashed in you fucking lightweights.
It is not the flight of the rich people from UK that is desired.
It is, nonetheless an encouraging sign that the millions of international opportunists who came to scavenge in the UK, to reduce wages and to make working conditions for the working class of the country tantamount to slave labour may think of finding another rotting carcass elsewhere in the world to go and pick.
There has been no rise in real income for many UK middle class since the 1990s. The minimum wage has, moreover become a stick to beat the unskilled native working class, who now find themselves in a self-perpetuating poverty trap.
Where are they going to go? Dubai? Hong Kong? Shanghai? all those cities are shit places to live and work
So is black crime capital London, probably be safer in South Africa these days than London.
You are a racist twat,
From Guido’s seen elsewhere, (Indirectly).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2009/12/how_the_bonus_tax_will_work.html
Darling leaks his PBR to his friends at the BBC.
Before he tells Parliament, or any one else.
These would be proposals from the two Nodders that came up with the idea that free weather repoerts would be available online to all
Heres news Badger and McMental they already are .
Fuck me
Dont these fools understand that its possible to just say FUCK OFF!
and move anywhere with internet access and trade stuff?
the bankers have already looted the public purse, the poor are stuffed for at least the next 2 generations, while the bankers wont have felt a thing, no change for them carry on as usual, life is just wonderful when you can rely on the taxpaying public to pick up the tab, and no matter what fiscal policy the politicians bring forward they wont feel a thing either, golden goodbys infation proof pensions and snouts in the trough
The money-shufflers can go where the fuck they like. They’ve already cost this country far more money than they ever paid in taxes.
If there really were so many golden opportunities around the world just waiting for them, they wouldn’t even be here in the first place, what with them not giving a shit about much else apart from their stashes.
I think they doth protest too much.
Very well said, Guido.
Did I hear Peston announce part of the PBR on Toady this morning? Still in the pay of No 10 then? Shameful. I hope that someone will have the balls to take this irritating little prat to task for this.
http://www.pitpass.com/fes_php/pitpass_news_item.php?fes_art_id=39655
So McDoom has skuppered Jensen’s future chances at another world F.1. championship!!
The City of London is under siege.
The French have indicated they want to circumsize London.
The FSA having been caught failing to properly regulate financial services are now hunting for notches on their bedpost. The FSA does not have enough supervisors so their policy is to look after the top 50 companies and scale back the 5,000 smaller companies to a more manageable figure. Someone should do a Freedom of Information request to see how many new companies have been given a licence this year and the answer will most likely be close to zero. The six week deadline for a decision is now actually more than nine moths and individuals transferring to new companies have complained of more than 3 months delays where it used to take 5 days. Companies that have infringed rules are being shut down for minor infractions to show the regualtor is doing their job. The treasury needs tax revenue from the city, but the FSA mandate is to remove regulatory approval (and shut companies down) instead of helping them to abide by the rules. This is a very destructive measure that directly impacts the city.
Many city workers are seeking to leave London as the FSA is intent on destroying the city, the UK economy is going to struggle for at least a decade, Brussels wants to diversify away from London and both Labour and the Conservatives want to reduce the tax income reliance coming from financial services. Couple in a 50% tax rate and a bonus debacle and you have a full blown brain drain.
What annoys people in London is that all of the imprudent companies that caused the credit crunch are not London based. Royal Bank of Scotland (Edinburgh), Bank of Scotland (Edinburgh), Halifax, Northern Rock (Newcastle), Bradford and Bingley. London based HSBC, Barclays and Standard Chartered have all weathered the storm.
The FSA is scared of making a bad decision, so they are applying the rules with draconian force and destroying peoples lives.
The city knows the UK is a spent force and those that can are leaving in droves.
Just listening to Jacqui Schmidt on BBC2 – when asked how Labour is going to sort things out she said ‘directing taxes onto the people with the broadest shoulders and continue to go for growth!’.
Oxygen thief.
OMG 5 bellies, 3 chins and excess baggage under her eyes on News channel at the moment. What an absolute twat she sounds and looks. Clearly her nose in the trough has increased since leaving the front benches.
PMQs – The pain in Spain in mainly in his Brain – very good one that.
Spanish president was at two G20 meetings, one in London, that means Spain is part of the G20 – so says the Prime Mentalist.
That presumably means that umpteen translators and secretaries are members of the G20 as well.
As Mervyn himself noted, you can’t afford to keep bailing these banks out without knocking them down to size or we will create an artificial market where certain banks are too important to lose.
Your libertarian values serve you well in most circumstances Guido but on this i believe you are blinkered. It’s about time we realise that Britain is not Great, it is just Britain, and behave accordingly. If these slimey, unpatriotic, self-interested idiots who almost brought us to the brink of oblivion can’t understand that in life there are consequences for mistakes then let them bugger off and good riddance. Perhaps that may cause trouble in the short-term but we’d get over it eventually and when we did we would have a new-found sense of propriety, self-respect and authority that would serve us much better than fawning to men whose disdain for the general populace is as clear as your dislike for Gordon Brown.
The Great part refers to the fact that Great Britain is the largest of the British Isles – only morons like Jon Gaunt and Nick Griffin bleat on about it meaning something else.
City Boy says: ‘The city knows the UK is a spent force and those that can are leaving in droves.’
Let’s hope we don’t get any hypocrisy from them about supporting our soldiers in Afghanistan then.
For what it is worth I have advised all my clients to short sterling, I expect Cable to test 1.5910 200 day moving average. It is 1.6220 as I type.
If 1.5910 breaks then 1.3570 will be seen in Jan/Feb in a sterling crises as the credit agencies put the UK on negative watch with a view to stripping us of our AAA status.
If I had a gin I would shoot Balls and Brown as I do not I will instigate a sterling crises to get rid of this government. Watch this space
With or without tonic?
Well I saw the PBR on telly,I thought,as Punch & Judy shows go it was pretty good.Come on guys – get real – but we know that won’t happen until after the election
So he’s proposing a tax of 50% on the bonuses. Hang on a bit, as high rate earners these waankers would already be paying 40% so that’s only an extra 10%!
You just don’t get it do you Guido?
Many of us don’t feel we need the bankers, thank you very much. We’d be very happy to see them heading off to Hong Kong, Turks and Caicos and – especially – Outer Mongolia.
Many of us feel, when you get down to it, that banking is not really that difficult or, looking at it another way, that if the bankers could not be bothered to look into triple A ratings on bundled debt, which they bought in the billions, then why should we confer on them alleged superpowers? They were useless at their job. Goodbye to them.
Banking is not say as difficult as designing a new car to meet the market’s requirements or finding a new export market for a product. To identify a risky loan as opposed to a pretty safe bet is not that difficult and in a rising market, all sorts of horses come in.
Many of us think we should find new people to undertake the work of bankers at a much lower cost to shareholders and bank users.
Why don’t we start a professional body – like we have medical and legal professional bodies – a responsible financial body that would train up talented individuals to undertake these activities but with some reasonable upper limit on rewards.
Very true.
The deal was that these fuckwit bankers did the easy but unsavoury work of finance. They were allowed to get easy money in return for being regarded as trash by everybody but themselves. That left intelligent, useful, respectable people free to do the work that actually required talent.
Turns out the bum boy banksters from private schools were so fucking dumb they had no idea what they were doing.
They had better leave now while they still can. Once we have regime change their only option will be to jump or be pushed. Splash!
[...] We’ll Pay for Banker Bashing As Alastair Darling prepares to deliver a kick in the bonuses to successful bankers, pause for thought. As the [...] [...]
Yeah, the UK seems to have got to a point of self-hatred. Everyone is so busy pointing the finger…
What Guido writes is completely true. The wise and wealth-originators are mobile.
I worked in Tokyo, London, Singapore, and Wall Street before retiring in my 40′s and getting the hell out (emigrating).
The UK might like to think again about how they despise wealth-creators. After all, who is paying for your big freebie?