"Throwaway Clothing"

Horrors! Clearly western civilisation is under threat from the callous manner in which we rape Gaia in order to clothe our nakedness!

Cheap garments, often made from manmade materials which cannot be recycled easily, are being worn just a few times and then binned, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee found.

As a result the proportion of textile waste at council tips has risen from 7 per cent to 30 per cent in five years.

I'm just wondering whether there's been anything else going on over the past five years. Has there, for example, been a rise...

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New Labour's first income tax rise since

Well, since when actually?

Since the last budget actually. Everyone seems to have missed this most basic point.

The new higher rate of tax - the first income tax increase in decades - will raise £670m a year.

This isn't true I'm afraid. Even the first income tax rate rise wouldn't be true giuven the abolition of the 10p tax band, but let's leave that aside.

But, I hear the assembled masses cry, income tax rates have not been raised by New Labour, have they? So therefore income tax hasn't risen, has it? QED.

Well, that's to ignore...

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Digging down

The IFS post budget briefing is becoming as anticipated by the media as the budget itself, and I'm sitting at the back with the crowds. The IFS spotted the 5 million losers from the abolition of the 10p tax band which Brown claims to have only noticed afterwards. So what do they see this time? My notes... 

1. The Treasury forecasts that a chunk of the City that once generated four percent of GDP is never coming back. That accounts for £22bn of the projected deficit, the splurge is just £9.3bn. To...

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Debt, debt and more debt

So this was the Recession Budget surprise: a seven-year horizon with no debt repayment plan. Ha! Bet you didn't expect that. Britain is to be transformed from a low-debt country into a nation saddled with a wartime debt without having fought a war. And as for today's Brownie - it's one the Stern Review used: fake juxtaposition. Brown presents the splurge (or splutter: £9.2bn this year, £16.3bn next) on one hand. And on the other, tax rises for the rich. He wants newspapers to write that one somehow cancels out the other. But...

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Daily Brief

One year and 21 days after Meredith Whitney's stardom was launched with her first note of gloom on Citigroup, the bank has fallen into the open arms of the federal government.

Whitney's October 31, 2007 research report predicted a dire fate for Citigroup and an unavoidable, imminent dividend cut. Citi shares plunged (to $33...ah, those were the days!), Whitney received death threats, Citi ousted its chief executive and cut its dividend, and the Oppenheimer analyst was suddenly Wall Street's most adored bear.

The analyst was virtually unknown until her outspoken skepticism on the "too big to fail" bank made...

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