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Pensfold

Listed below are comments made by Pensfold between Friday, 6th November 2009 and Sunday, 6th December 2009.

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Flattening, not falling? 12:22pm on 06 Dec 2009 Stephanie

I noticed that on Radio 5 live this Sunday morning you said that whichever party wins the election they will have an emergency budget shortly afterwards.

Which means that if Labour wins the election, despite having a budget in March, they will need an emergency budget after the election. This is presumably because their budget before the election will be an electioneering budget and the required tax increases and spending cuts will not be announced until after the election. Is this what you are saying?
Flattening, not falling? 8:33pm on 04 Dec 2009 Stephanie

Surely the big story of the moment is that apparently in the Pre Budget Report, Darling is not going to set out how the borrowing requirement is going to be reduced.

This seems likely to cause the government to be unable to sell new gilts to plug the deficit between government income and expense.
The Lib Dems and a taxing subject 2:48pm on 30 Nov 2009 It is in principle better to tax those who are wealthy than those who have a good income but little or no wealth. The only issue is the practicality.

In practice a crude but easy way to tax wealth is the mansion tax, using the existing house valuation methods for council tax as a basis.

People who claim that people with wealth but little income can not afford to pay a wealth tax are wrong. They can sell assets or take out home loans to pay their tax. After all younger people with high incomes can not use all the money to buy their house because a large part goes in tax - so they have to take out a bigger mortgage to be able to afford to pay their tax bill.
Winners and losers 3:16pm on 26 Nov 2009 Banks make little or no profit from running current accounts because of the cost of processing cheque and card payments, providing cheque books and plastic cards, offering branch counter services for paying in, telephone call centres, print and postage of statements, as well as granting and administering overdrafts and taking the bad debt hit on overdrafts. All for a tiny benefit of the "low interest" balances in the current account.

If they went back to charging for each transaction (and for unauthorised overdrafts) it would be fairer and also there would be less pressure on customer service staff to sell current account customers other products.
Alan Bown and Michael Brown - spot the difference(s) 1:46pm on 20 Nov 2009 The Electoral Commission today (Fri 20 November) confirmed what I said in my earlier comment (number 16 above).
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8370284.stm

The Liberal Democrats checked that the donation was permissible and after a thorough investigation the Electoral Commission say it was permissible.

UKIP did not check if the donation was permissible and the Electoral Commission investigation found that it was not permissible.
Heard the one about the stoat and the prawn? 3:23pm on 19 Nov 2009 Michael

Stephen Vadera should read Shriti Vadera or Baroness Vadera to you!
New name for a new economy? 2:19pm on 15 Nov 2009 There have always been regulators of private companies even in the most free markets.

We have not only bank regulation but regulation of water (OFFWAT), communications (OFFCOM) etc.

So I suggest the name should always have been REGULATED CAPITALISM.
Cat out of the bag on vouchers for boarding school 2:12pm on 15 Nov 2009 The reason the take up is so small is because it is only people who work for certain employers (eg the BBC and the NHS) that qualify and the self employed can not ever qualify apparently.
The real debate has scarcely begun 1:48pm on 10 Nov 2009 At the news conference today Brown again denied there were any spelling mistakes in his condolence letter. It seems that his assistants are too scared to point out to him where he goes wrong.
Boxed in 11:59am on 06 Nov 2009 I echo the words of comment 60. Given the current volume of quantitative easing what is the estimated increase in inflation (RPI and CPI) that can be expected and by when?

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