Tag: economy

Taxes, Taxes, Taxes

The gap between the rich and the poor — globally, nationally, within regions and cities — has been widening since the 1980s. It’s true that many people across the world have also been lifted out of poverty in that time, but simultaneously in the so-called developed world, wages for middle and low income workers have stagnated. When Pluto went into Capricorn in 2008, the Lord of Burn and Slash in the sign of Big Government and Big Business, we saw the banking crisis. But Pluto is still in Capricorn and the world economy is still in a state of transformation. […]

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Carillion: Death of a Frankenstein

It’s hard to overstate the importance of a company called Carillion to the British government and the British economy. Well, it collapsed today. Like its cannibalised name, Carillion is a corporation made up of the caracasses of other corporations. It was stitched together in 1999 to take advantage of the then-Labour government’s crush on the private sector. Carillion was hived off as a “service” arm from a much older construction company called Tarmac, created in 1903. This is how it describes itself on its website. “Carillion is a leading integrated support services business. We employ around 43,000 people and operate in […]

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The State We’re In

“Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions. […] And how does the bourgeoisie get over these […]

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The Panama Papers

“I want these crimes to be made public”, leaker “John Doe” to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. It turns out that very rich people have been hiding their money in secret bank accounts abroad. Why do they feel the need to do this? Either a) because the money is stolen or b) because they are avoiding taxes. Let’s deal with b, which may initially appear less heinous. Look at it this way: through your taxes you pay to keep the streets safe, the police on the beat, the garbage collected, the army ready to defend you, the sick well and the poor fed — guess what, […]

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Boxing The Euro

Keen readers of this blog will know I’ve been tracking the euro for years, as Uranus, Pluto and Saturn pummelled the currency from various angles. It’s been like watching a boxing match with all the razzmatazz, wordplay, and brutality, as well as cigar-wielding managers and backers sitting in the front row, waiting to see who hits the ropes first. One of the boxers has been the euro, a shiny fresh-faced currency; his opponent has been a shadowy, shapeshifter, a character brought to life by the energies of the outer planets, donning different masks over the last four years: Anonymous, Varoufakis, […]

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Playing Games With The Euro

“Rarely in modern times have we witnessed such a display of petulance and bad judgment by those supposed to be in charge of global financial stability, and by those who set the tone for the Western world. The spectacle is astonishing. The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the International Monetary Fund, among others, are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told. They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.” — Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writing in The Daily Telegraph (To […]

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UK Election: Striking A Balance

This surreally dreary British election campaign is apparently the closest-run in a generation. The opinion polls bounce back and forth between Labour and Conservative. From the public discourse, you might not suspect that there are serious issues to be resolved.  There’s little talk of security, the global economy, Britain’s future in a changing world, climate change or — perhaps most pressingly of all — inequality. There is much talk of opinion polls, spin doctors and politician’s spouses. Fluff. The rise in inequality in this country has been striking over the past 10-15 years, and it has accelerated dramatically over the last five: inequality between high-earners […]

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