Money

Time is, I fear, running out. Running out, that is, to avoid handing to a small number of multinational corporations our right to buy and sell things. Running out to prevent governments and central banks helping themselves to our savings, by means of negative interest rates. The payments industry is closing in on its target of driving cash out of circulation and instigating cashless payments as the only way of doing business. That, at least, is the conclusion one might reach from reading a report by Worldpay: the Global Payments Report 2021. It claims that cash payments in UK shops in 2020 made up 13.4 per cent of total payments,

It is a leading player in finance, and it’s companies are giants in life sciences and consumer goods. There were already lots of similarities between the Swiss and British economies, except that they are quite a bit richer and more successful than we are. Now we have something else in common: we have both been frozen out of the European Union’s Single Market. But hold on. Isn’t there an opportunity there as well? In truth, this would be the perfect moment to offer the Swiss a deal that would work for both sides – a common market. The Swiss have always had a fractious relationship with the EU. It has

Biden’s America, of course, is all about re-engaging with the world after four years of isolationism. But if you are the Irish finance minister, perhaps the new administration isn’t looking quite so cuddly at the moment.  Biden’s first big achievement in international cooperation looks like being a global minimum corporate tax rate. It seems that G7 nations are about to announce they have agreed on such a tax, set at 15 per cent. It will mean corporations paying a minimum of 15 per cent tax on their profits regardless of where they are based in the world, where they do business and where they pretend to do business.  Among those

Amidst all the explosive claims made by Dominic Cummings during today’s select committee hearing, one towards the beginning of the seven-hour session seemed rather unintentional. When asked by Rebecca Long-Bailey MP about what economic assessments were made when considering the first lockdown, Cummings responded that there was no straight-forward ‘document floating around’ which laid out the ‘economic costs’. He then alleged that conversations were taking place about removing the Bank of England’s independence: ‘It was the case that the Bank of England, the senior officials in the Treasury, senior officials in the Cabinet Office were saying, you know, we have to think about the consequence of, if we do this

Politically it must have seemed an easy promise for Theresa May to make in the dying days of her premiership: to commit Britain to a legally-binding target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050, rather than the 80 per cent reduction previously stipulated in the Climate Change Act. It was the summer of 2019 and Extinction Rebellion protests had taken place with surprisingly little counter-protest. David Attenborough’s TV documentary was received warmly by the press, and polls indicated that the public appeared to supported action on climate change – according to a YouGov poll in December 2018 two thirds of the population stated they did not believe the risks of

The government says it is ending a quarter of a century of the ‘fragmentation’ of the railways by gathering all mainline services into an entity called Great British Railways. That will please some critics of privatisation, but has the government actually renationalised the railways, as the unions, the Labour party and – to judge by some opinion polls – the public want? No, but it might superficially look like it. Gone will be the plethora of liveries, along with names such as Arriva, Great Western Railway and East Coast. The familiar old British Rail symbol of an arrow pointing in two directions will return. But anyone calling for the common