Taxation
 

Corporations.

And the matter of offshore accountancy.

Within this subject lie many of the current arguments related to taxation within the UK.

My thoughts are that corporation tax, in the manner it is currently imposed, should be scrapped – it patently does not work.
(think Apple, Google, Starbucks, Amazon et al, they are all multi-national corporations with worldwide recognised brands).
Then there is Facebook which paid £4000 corporation tax recently into the UK for all of it's activity within the UK.
(That is less than the individual tax paid by many people under personal taxation rules).

So, scrap it.

Then look again at the corporations and tax them on the fact that they exist and operate within a national boundary; one option would be to tax them on their turnover (as I understand it, the current taxation is based on declared profits which are passed through offshore bank accounts thereby showing little or no profit from massive presence in the UK).
To avoid a tax on turnover, corporations would have to close down operations in the UK; that is unlikely, but even if it did happen (for say a coffee shop) another business would start up to fill the gap.

Or tax them, literally, on the fact that they are here in the UK; look at what they do, analyse their presence, the amount of known customers (a form of poll tax on corporations), what premises they own, how much they spend on advertising in the UK, how many employees are based in the UK (another poll tax and it would apply even for those self employed and subcontracted to the corporation) and refine the taxation rules as experience of the way the corporations' lawyers and accountants react.
Such new tax rules would apply only to those companies registered as corporations because that latter designation has been misused for a long time.

Recently we managed to introduce laws to control the sale of plastic carrier bags and years ago we developed the means to track every animal that goes for sale in the auction marts (allegedly).

Such a new tax would be wide ranging because the establishment of corporations has become widespread for taxation reasons alone.
I don't know of a bank that is not registered as a corporation.
Many of the UK branded supermarkets are registered as offshore companies.
Many UK police forces are registered corporations.

It goes on.

Negative rates of interest
 

The bank of Japan has joined the move toward negative rates of interest, in their case by imposing charges for "storing" the cash of their depositors.
BOJ introduces negative interest rate to boost economy

This is becoming the norm for the central banks as they run out of methods to deal with the real economy.

More about how Japan does business
 

And, there are some interesting observations about the BoJ and their recent change of interest rates + reflections on how the economy of Japan functions.
https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2016/01...e-desperation/

The comments to the short article are as illuminating as the article itself.

An abstract from www.yourstrawman.com
 

When I made the statement above I had rather lost sight of where I had first seen this information.
Now I have come upon another statement of the issue:-

check it out via Dun & Bradstreet or any of the other places which records the setting up and performance of the 160,000,000 commercial companies world-wide. When you do that, you will discover that, for example, the House of Commons is a commercial for-profit company (number UC2279443), The Labour Party is a commercial company which trades under the name of “Allister Darling MP”, The House of Lords which is the highest court in the land is a private company, the United Kingdom Corporation Ltd. formerly known as the “United Kingdom plc” and which never complied with the law which requires it to file it's financial records, is also a private company. The Ministry of Justice D-U-N-S Number 22-549-8526, Directors: Lord Falconer of Thoroton is a private company set up in the year 1600. The Bank of England is a private company, as is every Court and every Police Force and even the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry is a company and not a person.

It gets even more ridiculous when you discover that The Devon and Cornwall Police is a company which has been taken over by a company owned by IBM which is paid an annual budget of £256,800,000 taken from members of the public. Gilbert and Sullivan would have loved this reality as a script for one of their comedies. Lancashire County Council was incorporated as a company (IP00666C) in 2002. It’s registered office was "3rd Floor, Christ Church Precinct, County Hall, Preston" and it was completely dissolved on 25th January 2008 and all of it’s Assets and Liabilities were transferred on 12th November 2007 to another company - “The Blues and Twos Credit Union Ltd.” whose registered address is Lancashire Police Headquarters, PO Box 77, Hutton, Preston. Do you by any chance get the feeling that you are being taken for a ride here?

http://www.yourstrawman.com/LCC.jpg

We have a strange view of economics. We ( broad brush but referring to most major economies) seem to view growth as the must have state of existence. Only problem is that we live in a finite space with finite resources so something has to meet the boundary wall of reality at some stage. Pyramid schemes can be popular and alluring but they all end the same way, and the economics of growth seems to have its parallels there. I am not sure if there has been a society that managed to sustain such a homeostatic state of being although I'd guess the Australian Aboriginal people did but I don't know enough to be sure.

What could be loosely called the Anglo-Saxon economic model does depend on economic growth -the oft quoted 2% growth - but not necessarily for the best of reasons.
Growth of the real economy is "traditional" and can be argued to be a desirable state of affairs of a nation, with the optimum use of expanding resources and the like and the attendant improvement in living standards for the population of said nation.

But, as per earlier posts in here, we are no longer living in anything like a "real" economy, but a system based on gambling-banks, fraud via the ponzi schemes of asset bubbles - inflate prices, suck in capital, collapse the bubble thereby fore-closing on each individual's "lost investment" and start over again.
Many "prosperous" companies keep their share holders content by means of financial accounting chicanery, buying back shares for instance, rather than investing in their real, original-reason-for-existing, economic activity.

Japanese debt is now thought to be at 250% of their GDP, up from 230% when last reported; the highest of the industrialised economies.
Weirdly, we don't hear of vast immigration figures for Japan - they are probably facing up to the 4th industrial revolution (I think that is what it is called = robotics).

Bump.

This needs to be revisited.
If only because the USA rates of interest have been raised by 1/4%, but for how long? (and why now?)

A short history of money
 

A useful short history of how money comes to exist:
THE HISTORY OF MONEY Rothschild Banking

How are the banks doing this week?
 

At heart, the Bank of England (BoE) is simply speaking, and acting, on behalf of their own private banking interests:
Sir John Vickers warns on inadequate bank capital | Business News | News | The Independent
And not in the best interests of the UK.

The article in this link gives an indication of why the BoE does what it does:
Volcker Rule Too big to fail Banks are too big to exist
With a nod in the direction of the Glass-Steagell legislation of the great depression era in the USA.
As an incidental, it has been commented elsewhere that the JPM banker in the picture within the link above is showing off his cufflinks quite prominently: the motif is that of a "seal of the US government".

As a further incidental, the current Governor of the BoE who has been in post for more than 2 years has got wrong every public pronouncement that he has made concerning the state of the UK economy and where rates of interest might be heading.

Meanwhile, banks in Italy are in deep doo doo, stuck with new rulings from the European Central Bank related to bail-ins and the illegality, under EU rules, for supporting their own banks with bail-outs as was done by all in the great financial crisis of the last decade.

Greenbacks and Bradbury Pounds
 

It feels like a sensible time to mention, again, the Bradbury £
Series: Bring Back The Bradbury Pound | UK Column
in the context of the current debate about the future UK referendum concerning membership of the EU.

And, with the 100th anniversary of WW1 in full swing, a commentary on the banking and political responses to such proposals;
Bankers, Bradburys, Carnage And Slaughter On The Western Front | UK Column

?c?

Counter Intuitive, like a left handed thread
 

Here's an interesting, recent (2012) aspect of research into how economies work, for both developed nations and those developing.
Reassessing the impact of finance on growth
Summary for developed nations:
If levels of credit exceed the GDP and/or if the financial sector of a specific economy employs more than 3.5% of the working population, then the increasing levels of investment are harmful to that economy.


This appears to be a classic case of diminishing returns for the real economy.
Some may have felt this effect qualitatively, now the research shows this to be the case quantitatively.

We live in very interesting times
 

I was quite taken with this pithy comment about a possible future:

"The idea of ‘earning’ a living is over. There are just not enough jobs and too many simpletons. The nature of society has to change. Robotics will escalate this process"
Along the way, the source blog brings together commentary about both the current Japanese and Italian economies et al.
https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2016/04...ina-and-japan/

Financialization, or financialisation if you prefer.
 

The process, in a nutshell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

This is a commentary about how it is applied in practice in the UK, with respect to the UK NHS:-
"This is all standard practice.
A simple formula that has been used on all former [now private] services.
First, you trash the service by loading it up with unnecessary expenses.
Then,once you have made it top heavy with managers, extra expenditure, extra costs, higher prices and other forms of legalized fraud, you create administerial chaos and personel instability.
Then you churn out carefully scripted propaganda about how we cannot afford it any more.
Then once you have fraudulently ‘cooked the books’ you flog the service off on the cheap according to a pre-arranged aggreement.
The new owners remove all the artificial overheads and enjoy the moneeeeee fron their cheap assets.
All the politicians concerned swan off to America to collect their thirty pieces of silver.
The peasantry have to pay twice as much for half the service they used to get for free from the service that they paid to build and run in the first instance.
Same old formula"

This video about the future of work, humans and machines is quite an eye opener. It certainly raise valid questions.


Regarding jobs I am already seeing lots of white collars jobs vanishing fast.


Plan B Economics: Humans, Machines, and the Future of Work

Asimov, author of "I Robot", saw it coming
 

Yes, that's a decent enough summary of what may be in store for those of us below a certain age.
It's not wholly new - there have been many similar commentaries (and driverless cars are due to appear on UK roads next year) - but it is a useful review.
The graphical presentations tie in well with the data presented in:-
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp...m=auto,-99,197
That paper of about 10 years ago takes the "traditional" economic-single-track view of how things are with the world today.

Regarding the fable of Eukosmos (can the EU part of that name be a total coincidence?) contained within the lecture:-
A country of that name exists in some minds, I have just discovered.
https://www.nationstates.net/nation=eukosmos
Such games will be the future for mankind when the robots are omnipotent?

One potential answer to this impending future has been proposed in at least one country; Switzerland.
It goes by the name of the social wage*, or similar.


*Basic Income is a better terminology; it's been a while since I looked at this concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income