Skip to main content

ECB: tax the rich

 


The European Central Bank’s chief economist has called on eurozone governments to tax rich people and companies more to finance support for those hit hardest by the energy crisis. Philip Lane said that funding for policies to help the most vulnerable groups in society «could take the form of higher taxes on higher earners or on industries and firms that are highly profitable despite the energy shock». Lane’s remarks were published after the UK government’s budget, which included a tax cut for the highest earners and triggered a bond sell-off and sharp depreciation of the pound. The UK and EU member states have unveiled fiscal support for households and businesses to deal with soaring energy prices.

Lane said governments faced a trade-off in choosing how to finance measures to support those hit hardest by the crisis created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has drastically cut Moscow’s supply of natural gas and oil to Europe. «From the view of fairness, but also a macroeconomic perspective, governments should support the income and consumption of those households and firms suffering the most,» said Lane.

www.sba.tax

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Cloud Bookkeeping

HS2 cost cuts new routes and add delays.

 Trans­port depart­ment offi­cials have begun work on «Project Sil­ver­light» sug­gest­ing the high­speed rail scheme might face four addi­tional years of delay. The planned High Speed 2 rail line faces fur­ther delays of up to four years and more cuts to the project under plans being drawn up by min­is­ters to rein in its bal­loon­ing costs. The extra delays to the coun­try’s biggest infra­struc­ture project would mean that it would not be com­pleted until as late as 2045 — 12 years after ori­gin­ally planned. «This is a func­tion of infla­tion; we are hav­ing to find huge sav­ings because the cost of everything the depart­ment is already doing will have become so much more expens­ive by then,» said one gov­ern­ment offi­cial. In Octo­ber, the FT repor­ted that the Treas­ury had asked HS2’s man­age­ment team to identify poten­tial cuts or «scope reduc­tions» to the high-speed line. Trans­port depart­ment offi­cials have sub­sequently begun work on Project Sil­ver­light aimed at fi...
4 comments
Read more

Google has launched its Bard chat­bot.

  Google has launched its Bard chat­bot in a move to rival OpenAI’s pop­u­lar Chat­GPT, as it seeks to make up lost ground in the race to com­mer­cial­ise gen­er­at­ive arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence tech­no­logy. Google said that Bard, which provides answers to text­based ques­tions, will be run sep­ar­ately from its Google Search engine. In recent weeks, gen­er­at­ive AI has also been integ­rated into widely used pro­ductiv­ity applic­a­tions, such as Google’s Work­space includ­ing Google Docs and Gmail, and Microsoft’s Office 365 soft­ware, as well as into pop­u­lar apps such as Duolingo, allow­ing mil­lions of people to start inter­act­ing with the tech­no­logy. «We want to get feed­back and gradu­ally phase up the num­ber of people who have access to Bard, and the reason for that is we want to be able to test and learn from that before we roll it out very widely,» said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice-pres­id­ent of Google Research. Bard is built on top of Google’s AI tech­no­logy known a...
3 comments
Read more

Doubt on CS's collateral.

  Credit Suisse provided an emergency $140mn loan to Greensill Capital based partly on invoices to companies that deny ever doing the business stated on the documents. The Swiss bank provided the loan in October 2020, less than five months before the collapse of Greensill, a supply chain finance firm that counted former British prime minister David Cameron as a senior adviser. Invoices issued by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Commodities and sold to Greensill formed part of the collateral for the loan, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and people familiar with the transaction. Yet several of the parties named on the invoices have told the FT they did no business with Liberty. GFG has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Credit Suisse’s loan had a clause dictating that the collateral value had to be equal to or greater than the $140mn borrowed. The terms of the debt agreement only allowed invoices on Green-sill’s balance sheet to count towards this tally if t...
2 comments
Read more