November saw the G20 group of world leaders meeting in Canberra. The summit was notable for the new sport invented by the great and good: a bizarre game of musical chairs in order to avoid being photographed sitting next to Vladimir Putin! Not to be outdone in the social pariah stakes, David Cameron turned Cassandra, […]
It is now six years since emergency measures were put in place to protect the global financial markets from imploding when the banking crisis spiked in 2008. To stave off a liquidity disaster, many global policy makers decided to cut interest rates to record low levels. At that juncture most experts, commentators and the investment […]
The price of crude oil has fallen around 40 per cent since a recent peak in June this year. This has a profound effect on economies and markets around the world as the cost of manufacturing and transporting goods falls along with oil producers’ income and the currencies of oil-rich countries. The theory goes that […]
It seems odd that in a general climate where there is so much controversy over foreign corporations paying no tax in the UK, pop stars using dubious tax avoidance schemes, and where there is a raging debate about whether “we are all in this together”, there sits in the middle of our tax system, the […]
2014 was a momentous year for pensions. Changes around how pensions could be drawn at retirement and how death taxes on pensions would be improved were both announced in the year, with the intention that all these new rules will be in place by the end of April 2015. For a pension saver, the landscape […]
Introduction When George Osborne stood up to deliver his Budget in March everything in his garden was rosy – or as rosy as the prevailing world economy would allow. Most of the UK economic indicators were moving in the right direction and it was generally agreed that the UK was recovering from the global recession […]