Tag Archives: mervyn king

Stephen Tall

Barclays and the Bank of England: BAD rate-rigging and GOOD rate-rigging

By Stephen Tall | Wed 4th July 2012 - 11:15 am

The Barclays rate-rigging scandal has conflated a number of issues — Bob Diamond’s bonus, ‘casino’ banking, failed regulators — making it hard to get behind the media’s shouty headlines to understand the issues which should really concern us. Here’s my brief show-your-working attempt, starting with what Barclays.

What Barclays did right: ‘fess up

LIBOR (London Inter Bank Offered Rate) is the rate at which banks in London lend money to each other for the short-term. It’s used as a proxy measure of market confidence in individual banks, as well as a benchmark for setting mortgage interest rates.

Barclays has admitted filing misleading …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , and | 15 Comments
Joe Bourke

Opinion: Land Value Tax – an old idea with lots of modern supporters

By Joe Bourke | Thu 10th May 2012 - 5:56 pm

Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776) was an early proponent of land taxes as was that great radical Tom Paine.

John Stuart Mill was an advocate and Henry George put the case in ‘Progress and Poverty’ (1879).

The economist David Ricardo gave us the concept of economic “rent” – that land or property derives its value from scarcity rather than investment.

In the debates before and after the peoples budget of 1909 both Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George argued strongly for the introduction of a land tax.

The economists John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman recommended Land Value Tax (LVT) for …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , , , and | 258 Comments
Mark Pack

Sharon Bowles named most influential Brit in global financial regulation

By Mark Pack | Sun 6th February 2011 - 8:55 am

Sharon Bowles, Liberal Democrat Euro-MP for South East England, is the highest placed British person in the GFS Power 50 list of the most influential figures in global financial regulation.

Sharon BowlesThe list is voted on by readers of Global Financial Strategy, and Sharon Bowles came out twentieth due to her role as Chair of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. This committee of MEPs has an important role in debating and amending European-wide financial regulation, including new rules on bank capital and bankers’ bonuses.

Sharon Bowles came ahead …

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Posted in Europe / International and News | Also tagged , , and | 3 Comments
Sara Bedford

Daily View 2×2: 30 March 2010

By Sara Bedford | Tue 30th March 2010 - 9:21 am

Today just 2250 years ago, the first sighting of what we now know as Halley’s Comet was recorded Eric Clapton becomes eligible to draw his pension, whilst it’s also ‘Happy Birthday’ to fellow sexagenarians Robbie Coltrane (60), Eddie Jordan (62) and Mervyn King (63).

Once this day in 1978, the Conservative Party announced it had recruited advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi to revamp its image and get its political message across ahead of the General Election. Politicians both within the opposition and in Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s government criticised the Tory stance, describing it as ‘frivolous’.

Fourteen years later we saw John Major climb onto his soapbox to urge voters in Cheltenham to elect John Taylor as their MP – a mission which resulted in the election of Lib Dem Nigel Jones.

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Posted in Daily View and News | Also tagged , , , , , , , and | 3 Comments
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