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Robiati

Listed below are comments made by Robiati between Friday, 11th September 2009 and Monday, 14th December 2009.

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Bonus tax: Innocents punished? 5:57pm on 14 Dec 2009 47. At 4:06pm on 14 Dec 2009, trader wrote:

'Flame away because I simply don't care anymore. By the way, for relocation, I'm thinking Monaco.'

Monaco is a very nice place. For a weekend. That's how long it takes to realize it's little more than posh concrete. And cramped posh concrete at that. Lots of nice cars though... If you think the best place for a supercar is a traffic jam and you like the challenge of squeezing it into an underground parking space that would be tight for a Vespa and has cost you €200,000.
Bonus tax: Innocents punished? 5:08pm on 14 Dec 2009 If this is true it's a dirty great screw up on the part of the Government. There's no reason, however hastily penned this windfall tax, why it couldn't have targeted banks only. If brokers et al get dragged into this we shall be punishing entirely the wrong group. If a film is poor you don't, if you're sensible, take it out on the guy in the box office.

Though I don't, still, accept that the UK is more hostile in general than other countries – at least not its major competitors. That doesn't justify this tax creepage but it would cause me to question the judgement of anyone who seriously wanted to jump ship to another territory for this reason alone.
Will taxing bonus pools spur lending growth? 6:47pm on 09 Dec 2009 2. At 3:34pm on 09 Dec 2009, Ed Dixon wrote:

'Say a footballer has a win bonus of £50,000 for winning the Champions League next year - does that fall under the scheme? If not why not?'

I think you're missing the point... The scheme is to tax bankers bonuses, above a certain level, that relate to a period when the banking system would have collapsed if tax payers had not stepped in and rescued it. That means two things:

1. Any such bonuses paid to bankers are arguably for failure not success.

2. The scheme should not apply to the payrolls of football clubs, or any other business for that matter, as they haven't enjoyed a taxpayer bailout.
Will biffing bankers also biff Britain? 2:14pm on 08 Dec 2009 "But if those bonuses are taxed at say 80%, it would be rational for the owners of the banks - the big investment institutions - to instruct banks' boards not to pay bonuses at all, because to do so would be to squander precious share capital."

Such a cat-and-mouse game is by no means impossible for the Government to win. First you set the principle... that bonuses derived from taxpayer support – whether directly or indirectly – will be subject to a windfall tax (I think the Government has done that bit). Then you wait to see what the City does, when it awards these bonuses, and you tax them retrospectively.

On the whole I dislike retrospective taxation. But, as a taxpayer, I equally dislike being called upon at zero notice to bail out banks. That makes this occasion an exception.

Having handed taxpayers a large bill with zero notice the bankers can hardly complain when they get the same treatment.

And if some bankers really want to move to Switzerland (yawn!) in response to a one-off tax perhaps they are the kind of short-term thinkers we could do without. Those who don't find 24/7 life in Switzerland a bit on the monotonous side probably don't really want to be in London anyway. Those who do may well make their way back. But, perhaps, they'll find more capable people in their old jobs.
Flattening, not falling? 6:54pm on 04 Dec 2009 To be honest this is no great surprise. The ONS did make it clear in releasing its initial estimates that the margin for error might well mean we were out of recession already – even if large parts of the media and certain people in politics chose to ignore this fact. True, it could equally have meant things were much worse but that was frankly unlikely given the general lack of optimism currently.

I don't mean to sound complacent but, while not good, things are nowhere near as bad as many in the media would have us believe.

UK Govt. debt is currently 59.2% of GDP. High, yes. But still lower than the level in all the other G7 countries BEFORE the credit crunch (source = IMF). True there was a trend of deteriorating public finances in the UK before the credit crunch and there are factors that arguably make true UK Govt. debt higher. But we are in no way in a bad position in global terms, even if certain sections of the media are hell bent convincing us otherwise (probably in order to help perpetuate their self-declared reputation for King-making in UK politics).

As for stimulus, if you look at the G7 nations plus India and China, the UK has the fourth lowest spending on its stimulus package. Only France, India and Italy have spent less. Specifically, stimulus is 1.5% of GDP for the UK compared with 4.4% of GDP for China, 4.8% for the US, 3.4% for Germany, 2.7% for Canada and 2.2% for Japan.

This means that, if it is already out of recession (or close to it), the UK will have achieved this with a lower level of stimulus and a lower risk from negative effects when the stimulus ends than most of our major global competitors.

None of this means much right now if you've just lost your job, obviously. But it is important for the future and I am sick of only hearing the downside.

The private debt level in the UK IS a problem and in my view a much bigger issue than public debt. But we don't hear so much about that. Perhaps it doesn't sell newspapers?
Bank reform: The radical way 09:10am on 22 Oct 2009 Radicals? I'd prefer to call them 'sensibles'. The sooner we decouple the speculative arms of banks the better. Radical is the demonstrably dangerous structure we have at the moment.
Should students pay our bills? 1:05pm on 22 Sep 2009 24. At 6:55pm on 21 Sep 2009, belovedjudge-mental wrote:
'Or, put another way - "go to University because it will increase your earning power - an even bigger chunk of which we're going to take off you".
How is this supposed to inspire people?
The point of Universities teaching the top few percent is that we, as a society, benefit from their knowledge. Punitive taxation based on implicit jealousy is insane.'

The problem is it is not just a few percent anymore and the money has to come from somewhere. You don't have to be jealous, implicitly or explicitly, to see that we simply cannot afford as a country to fund the level of university education that is now demanded.

I don't think it is outrageous to ask people that get financial benefit from their university education to contribute. Though, as per my earlier post, I think we need to be sure we don't charge them until they really start to see the financial benefit.
Should students pay our bills? 6:13pm on 21 Sep 2009 'The argument, surely, would be along the lines of saying that a student should pay a price that captures the uplift to his or her earning power from the relevant course and qualification, the private gain, as opposed to the benefit for society.'

The issue with this is that not everyone who goes to University gets such an uplift and it is quite legitimate for some to pursue a poorly-paid career – one that might have significant social benefit.

This is why I've always argued that we need to monitor the average pay of graduates relative to that of non-graduates and only start collecting student loan repayments when a graduate's salary rises above that of their none-graduate peers.

This would be fairer and would not unduly punish those that study with an objective that will provide little or no personal enrichment in relative terms.

I did write to the Lib Dems years ago suggesting that this might be a more realistic policy than abolishing tuition fees altogether. But they simply sent a boiler-plate response talking of the importance of free education for all. It has been clear for ages that this position is fantasy.

But that doesn't mean we can't make the current system fairer.
How Rover executives pocketed £42m 3:04pm on 11 Sep 2009 92. At 10:16am on 11 Sep 2009, Prozac1000 wrote:

'Ok, so the directors of the company paid themselves £42m. Given that the company failed with "debts greater than £1bn", why is this significant? If the directors had worked for nothing, would that have stopped the company from failing? I think not'

That's not the point though is it Prozac. No one is arguing that the directors should not have been paid. But they got Rover for £10 by claiming they could make a success of it and secure jobs and livelihoods in the process. Then they ran it into the ground while rewarding themselves VERY handsomely for their abject failure.

Daft as it was for the Government to believe them in the first place, I think most people would agree the directors' approach was greedy, shoddy and selfish.

It simply doesn't make sense to excuse their greed by comparing the money they took to the much larger loss they produced. If you think it does, imagine how you would feel if you discovered that, say, your pension fund manager had charged you exorbitant fees and they defended themselves by saying 'our fees are a mere fraction of the money we've lost on your behalf'.
How Rover executives pocketed £42m 09:06am on 11 Sep 2009 37. At 07:43am on 11 Sep 2009, Roberto1966 wrote:
'The actual story here is that the Government chose the Pheonix offer when it knew it was flawed because it was politically expedient to do so.'

Quite! And Rover wrokers (and ex Rover workers) I knew in Birmingham at the time thought this was the wrong decision right from the off. So this was pretty basic and broad-brush expediency.

The only viable option was to reduce the size of the business as Alchemy said repeatedly to the media at the time. XX% of something is better than nothing. Not a tough calculation!

I'm not sure what appalls me more... The millions pocketed by the opportunist lightweights that were gifted Rover or the millions wasted writing a toothless report with self-evident 'conclusions' that has side-stepped the manifest culpability of the Government in this.

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