Lagarde-loo

Time for another interesting UK/Greece comparison; we know the established Greek elite is a corrupt bunch of shyster, drachma grabbing tax dodgers – no one likes dodging taxes like a rich Greek it seems.

The Largade list provides powerful evidence of this, it detailing almost 2,000 potential tax dodgers Christine Lagardem when she was the French finance minister, handed to the Greek government in 2010. And what did the then Greek government do with it? Why nothing of course, they sat on it give or take the rumours about the then Greek Finance minister rubbing out the names of some of his relatives who appeared on it. Then in 2012 a Greek journalist was arrested for publishing the list, then set free a few days later.  Pffff, Greeks eh? Utterly bent and corrupt tax dodging bastards.

P.S. the Largarde list was of HSBC Swiss bank customers and was taken from the same dataset used to produce a list of potential (1 in 3 appears to have been the case) British tax dodgers. Obviously, Britain is completely different to Greece, HMRC received an email offering them the HSBC customer data in 2008, years before Greece chose to do nothing.

HSBC vs the ruling class

Galloping inequality is arguably a bad thing because it distances the rich from the rest of society at the same time as giving the disproportionately wealthy a disproportionate influence on the polity (think political party donations, post-ministerial investment bank careers etc.).

One powerful response to this is that as we all - eventually -  benefit from wealth creators thru things like the taxes they pay, inequality is justifiable. Then we found out about HSBC's private bank ………….. (and if you want to find out what having an ruling class that can dodge taxes with impunity does to an economy, just look at Greece)

Squeezing (HSBC's) balloons

Whoop whoop – I’ve just had the misfortune to fly enough times for work to qualify for an airline “executive card”, but more of that later.

Before this week HSBC wasn’t especially famous for its private bank. Money laundering? Yep. Shit US mortgages? That too, but private banking? Nope at least not until Panorama and a whistleblower told us all about the shenanigans it’s been getting up to.

The thing is though while Panorama did focus on one of the big questions – why has only one person been prosecuted in the UK given this was industrial scale tax dodging – it didn’t think about the bigger picture, which includes things like this:

If HSBC has run down its private bank since it got caught the way it says it has – its clients will have gone to other private banks.

There already were (and are) lots of other private banks and private bank divisions – so what about them then?

As for the lack of prosecutions, well lets be serious for a mo and cite a concrete example - investing in UK films was quickly spotted as a way of getting all tax efficient by loads of accountants and bankers, so much so some RBS bankers were arrested relatively recently due to their involvement in one. Anyhoo, the other day the solicitor fucking general was identified as someone who invests in film funds i.e. the great, the good and Gary Barlow all appear to be at it meaning HSBC’s real “crime” was getting caught.

That the guy in charge of HSBC when all its shenanigans was going on got ordained as an Anglican minister i.e. is a moralising fuck, just adds to it all.

As for my executive card – it’s a shit one with no real perks; I need another grade to get all the free food, drink and pampering I can manage; tthe point of me saying this being it was fun seeing some of the upper grade (“class” even)  great and good getting doorstepped on the telly because in their lovely, lovely world no one ever, EVA challenges them.

weaponised hummus

Don;t know about you, but this eyewitness account from Auschwitz reads like the kind of stuff those horny bastards at the CIA got up to when they were torturing folks.

"aged nine in 1944, remembers being forced to watch a dwarf and a Roma woman being made to have sex."

Going Greek

Comparing the British economy to the Greek was always a dumb thing to do. For one thing, there everybody dodges taxes whereas here its only multinationals and millionaires. For another, Greek government largesse was dished out to everyone, whereas here, via things like the pensioner bond, political parties look after their own. And of course the UK has its own currency.  

But, as the political parties here boast about whose got the biggest, hardest spending cuts, Greece does provide an example of what an unprecendented hacking back of the state in the name of fiscal rectitude looks like – it looks nasty, like  25% unemployment rate nasty, 50% youth unemployment rate nasty (and that’s despite people migrating), heck an economy that’s shrunk around a quarter in 5 years nasty, a quarter! Anyhoo, the Tories are currently proposing spending cuts on what the IFS calls “a colossal scale” *.


*of course other factors have influenced the Greek economy, but hacking back on public spending is a major one that has had similar effects in other countries. See here.

HS2 as groundhog day

This is an easy post to write because its mostly already been written, so actually lets tag on some new bits at the end. Anyhoo, according to the BBC MPs are questioning the value for money of HS2. Except, there's  no need to waste time and money doing so because we already know the government's own, "independent" value for money analysis is a made up pile of bull crap.

Go here to a Dec 2013 post wherein "Professor Dan Graham of Imperial College, London, said "I do not think the statistical work is reliable" while Professor Henry Overman of the London School of Economics described KPMG's approach as "essentially made up". And lets be clear, an academic calling something “essentially made up” is more than casting doubt, he is saying it's garbage to an extent where this isn't actually a debate."

To which the consultants - who guessed the size of HS2's financial benefits  - said; their methodology "does not have a firm statistical foundation”.

And that's it really. There is no debate - the analysis isn't "reliable", is "essentially made up" and lacks "a firm statistical foundation". Well there is one debate, but that;'s why hasn't HS2 been shitcanned already, like seriously? Like what we are seeing are Tories willing to piss away money on vanity infrastructure projects like a Tony Blair on speed at the same time as they're changing welfare rules to the point where people wrongly denied benefits are committing suicide.

There's something nastily Republican/GOP about how the Tories stink these days.

In praise of Russell Brand. Seriously *.

Successive Labour and Tory governments have had increasing institutional investment in the British residential property market as a policy goal. The Montague review, for instance, was targeted at identifying both barriers to institutional investment and ways of overcoming them; and with institutional investors’ allocations to residential property rising from £7.6 billion in 2012 to £12.7 billion in 2014, it’s an area where government can claim to have had some success.

Whoopee, except I’m not sure how much awareness there is of the fact property investors typically - and fundamentally - differ from other institutional investors. A pension fund, for instance, owns lots of little bits of companies, enough to give it the right to contribute a few votes at an AGM and get patronised by the CEO and CFO once in a while, but not enough to really influence whatever it is a company does. By contrast, property investors usually own whatever it is they invest in outright (give or take a bank loan), which is why property investors actively “sweat” their assets, be it churning the - poorer performing - pubs in a pubco portfolio or increasing the number of folks selling things off carts down the aisle of your local shopping centre.

This brings us to Russell Brand who helped draw attention to what increased institutional investment in residential property can, does and will mean. After an Ummurikan investment firm bought the New Era Estate in London, it promptly set about trying to evict people in the name of redevelopment i.e. get in folks who could pay higher rents/buy the properties; nice. So sure, sure, the London housing market is different, but the principle applies across Britain - institutional investors will actively try to “sweat” their assets, that being potentially a euphemism for clearing out entire estates en masse.

Now there is the moral case against evicting people because you can, but that will never fly beyond the pages of the Grauniad, so lets make an economic one; evicting people like this imposes obvious externalities (costs) on everyone else i.e. us  - the employer that finds his key staff have resigned to move elsewhere, the employees who can no longer afford the commute so resign and sign on, the schools contending with an influx of new pupils, the transport companies that suddenly lose out on wodges of fares, etc., etc.,  bause the thing to bear in mind is why successive governments have tried to encourage more institutional investment; s social housing has become increasingly about social need, this has left a widening stratum of working poor too “rich” to qualify for housing association help and too poor to buy a house – these are the precarious people government is hoping institutional investors will cater for.

And my god the interviewer in the clip above was a monumental walloper for trying so hard to turn such a fundamental issue into a  story about the size of Russell Brand’s bank account.

 

* fucking hell. This is how shite politics has got in Britain today.