| Real wage change (%) | Employment rate change (percentage points) | |
| Greece |
-10.4 |
-9.0 |
| UK |
-10.4 |
0.6 |
| Portugal |
-3.7 |
-5.4 |
| Italy |
0.9 |
-2.3 |
| Czech Rep |
1.1 |
1.0 |
| Ireland |
1.6 |
-7.9 |
| Spain |
2.8 |
-8.5 |
| Netherlands |
3.4 |
-1.7 |
| Denmark |
4.0 |
-3.2 |
| Lithuania |
4.3 |
5.5 |
| Israel |
4.3 |
1.9 |
| Finland |
4.3 |
-3.8 |
| Belgium |
4.4 |
-0.7 |
| Japan |
4.7 |
2.6 |
| Latvia |
4.9 |
-3.0 |
| USA |
6.4 |
-3.4 |
| Austria |
6.5 |
1.2 |
| OECD average |
6.7 |
-0.6 |
| Slovenia |
7.2 |
-4.3 |
| Australia |
7.2 |
-0.7 |
| Hungary |
9.3 |
5.9 |
| Canada |
9.4 |
-1.7 |
| Sweden |
10.1 |
-0.7 |
| France |
10.5 |
-1.8 |
| Luxembourg |
11.1 |
-1.2 |
| Switzerland |
11.3 |
0.5 |
| Slovakia |
12.3 |
0.9 |
| Estonia |
13.4 |
2.2 |
| Germany |
13.9 |
5.1 |
| Poland |
23.0 |
4.5 |
Category Archives: Blog
The Case for a Financial Transactions Tax
The report argues:
- A financial transactions tax could likely raise over $105 billion annually (0.6 percent of GDP) based on 2015 trading volume. This estimate is roughly in the middle of recent estimates that ranged from as high as $580 billion to as low as $30 billion.
- The full amount of this tax would be borne by the financial industry, and not individual holders of stock or pension funds and other institutional investors. Evidence suggests that trading volume is elastic with respect to price, meaning that any drop in trading volume resulting from the tax would reduce costs for end users by a larger amount than the tax would increase them.
- It is reasonable to believe that the industry would be no less effective in serving its productive use (allocating capital) after the tax is in place. This means that one of the primary effects of the tax would be to reduce waste in the financial sector, reducing costs while having little or no effect on its principal purpose: to allocate capital effectively.
- The revenue raised through an FTT would easily be large enough to cover the cost of free college tuition (among other social programs), although if nothing were done to stem the growth rate of college costs, it would eventually prove inadequate.
The report also notes that the financial sector is the main source of income for many of the highest earners in the economy. This means that downsizing the industry through an FTT could play an important role in reducing income inequality.
The mission of the F-35
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is possibly one of the most useless jets and biggest waste of taxpayer money ever conceived by the US military. In fact, according to Pierre Sprey, one of the three men that created the F-16, the point of this plane is “to spend money.” He clarifies, “that is the mission of the airplane, is for the US Congress to send money to Lockheed [Martin].”
Boiling the Humanity
This, on current trends, will be the hottest year ever measured. The previous record was set in 2015; the one before in 2014. Fifteen of the 16 warmest years have occurred in the 21st century. Each of the past 14 months has beaten the global monthly temperature record. But you can still hear people repeating the old claim, first proposed by fossil fuel lobbyists, that global warming stopped in 1998.
Continue reading
£1bn of weapons flow from Europe to Middle East
Thousands of assault rifles such as AK-47s, mortar shells, rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons and heavy machine guns are being routed through a new arms pipeline from the Balkans to the Arabian peninsula and countries bordering Syria.
The suspicion is that much of the weaponry is being sent into Syria, fuelling the five-year civil war, according to a team of reporters from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
Arms export data, UN reports, plane tracking, and weapons contracts examined during a year-long investigation reveal how the munitions were sent east from Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Montenegro, Slovakia, Serbia and Romania.
Continue reading
The derivatives exposure of Deutsche Bank is €55,000 billion
The two global banks with the largest derivatives exposures are J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank. The derivatives exposure of J.P. Morgan is around $70,000 billion and of Deutsche Bank €55,000 billion. These figures are, respectively, about one-and-a-half times the total value of all the assets in the USA, and twenty times German national income. But the numbers in the balance sheets of these banks are much lower. Deutsche Bank declares its investment in derivatives at €768 billion: not a small amount, but only a modest fraction of the bank’s exposure. Deutsche Bank’s financial position is set out in Fig. 9.
Continue reading
The effects of poverty costs the UK £78bn a year
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) estimates that the impact and cost of poverty accounts for £1 in every £5 spent on public services.
The biggest chunk of the £78bn figure comes from treating health conditions associated with poverty, which amounts to £29bn, while the costs for schools and police are also significant. A further £9bn is linked to the cost of benefits and lost tax revenues. …
The JRF report, called “counting the cost of UK poverty”, estimates that 25% of healthcare spending is associated with treating conditions connected to poverty.
Continue reading
Important Lessons from Studying the Planet
Lesson One. Physics Trumps Politics and Economics. Every Time.
The first lesson I learned from the planet is about the absurdity of our “real world” politics and economics.
Despite what many people claim, politics and economics are arbitrary systems of belief that people in power have invented over the years. And regardless of what we have been brought up to believe, the planet does not actually obey the rules of politics and economics. It never has.
Lesson Two. Thermodynamics and Systems Thinking are Powerful Tools.
The next lesson I’ve learned over the years is that thermodynamics and systems thinking are very powerful tools for understanding and describing the workings of our planet.
Big executive pay not for performance, but for underperformance.
We’d probably expect to see a pretty tenuous relationship between companies’ share price performances and the rewards of those at the top of them. We’d also probably expect to see a one-way ratchet, where pay goes up in good times for a company, but rarely falls in bad times. We probably expect to see executives quite often rewarded for luck, rather than skill.
And guess what? Those things are precisely what the latest data does suggest. The financial data firm MSCI has taken a sample of 428 large listed American companies and examined their performance between 2006 and 2015. And MSCI has found that shareholder returns at those firms whose boss earned below the median of their sector outperformed those firms whose boss earned above the median.
Trident
Cripin Blunt on Trident
Cripin Blunt, the Conservative chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, spoke after Angus Robertson in the debate and he said he would not be voting for Trident renewal.
Earlier, in an intervention, he said that his current estimate was that Trident renewal would have a lifetime cost of £179bn.
- Blunt said Trident renewal would be “the most egregious act of self-harm to our conventional defence”.
Underfunded NHS needed £3 billlion “working capital loans” from government last year
The government had to lend cash-strapped hospitals a record £2.825bn in the last financial year so they could pay staff wages, energy bills and for drugs needed to treat patients.
The Department of Health was forced to provide emergency bailouts on an unprecedented scale to two-thirds of hospital trusts in the 2015-16 financial year because they were set to run out of money, the Guardian can reveal.
Continue reading
Europe’s political and economic pact
PFI has sucked NHS funding dry
The NHS has more than 100 PFI hospitals. The original cost of these 100 institutions was around £11.5bn. In the end, they will cost the public purse nearly £80bn. The total UK PFI debt is over £300bn for projects worth only £55bn. This means that nearly £250bn will be spent swelling the coffers of PFI groups.
Continue reading
Resolution Foundation: Why did we vote to leave?
There are six key takeaways.
First, living standards matter. Reflecting on the results three weeks ago, we noted that recent changes in living standards hadn’t played much of a role – despite the contention that people were angry about the post-financial crisis squeeze on living standards – but that deeper rooted economic differences did. That finding is confirmed in our more detailed investigation, with employment levels proving the indicator with the strongest link to tendency for an area to vote Leave. A 10 percentage point (ppt) rise in the employment rate within a local authority is associated with a 1.7ppt fall in the leave vote. Areas where high numbers of people are out of work voted to leave.
Continue reading
Labour rebels are destroying their own party
Contempt for Corbyn is rivalled only by disdain for the party that elected him. His critics argue that the membership is unrepresentative of the country as a whole. By definition most political memberships are, but that does not mean they represent nothing. In this case the Labour party membership represents two quite crucial constituencies. First, the group that will help select the Labour MPs and leaders. And second, the group that will knock on doors and staff the phones to fight for a Labour government. Those are no small things.
If Corbyn resigned tomorrow, the issues that he raised would still stand, and the Parliamentary Labour party would still have no coherent response to them. He did not create the dislocation between the PLP and the membership, he merely illustrates it. His critics say they want their party back. Their party may well say it wants Corbyn back. In the absence of any reckoning as to how that discrepancy came about and any idea what to do about it, his critics are going to destroy the party they claim they love to save it from a leader it prefers.
Who benefited from globalisation
The Surprisingly Swift Decline of US Manufacturing Employment
So why did American trade policy make such a big difference, even though tariffs didn’t fall? Pierce and Schott can’t say for sure, but they speculate that it has to do with patterns of investment.
Giving Chinese companies confidence that tariffs would stay low encouraged them to invest in production capacity aimed at supplying the American market. And giving American companies confidence that tariffs would stay low encouraged them to build supply chains around Chinese manufacturers.
USA, Militization, Japan
TNI: War Profiteers Are Now Refugee Profiteers
The report (pdf), Border Wars: The Arms Dealers Profiting from Europe’s Refugee Tragedy, released jointly by the European Stop Wapenhandel and Transnational Institute (TNI) on Monday, outlines arms traders’ pursuit of profit in the 21st century’s endless conflicts.
“There is one group of interests that have only benefited from the refugee crisis, and in particular from the European Union’s investment in ‘securing’ its borders,'” the report finds. “They are the military and security companies that provide the equipment to border guards, the surveillance technology to monitor frontiers, and the IT infrastructure to track population movements.”
Continue reading
Tipping Point North South 