Well that simply reinforces my point that people in this country need to put their problems into wider perspective. You live in a country where you don't get just a single chance in life, and the circumstances of your birth (again, all other things being equal) do not dictate your fate. GDP growth below 1% for a few years is not a very good reason for this dramatic increase in grand acts of self obliteration.

People in Somalia will survive rape, destitution, gunshot wounds and the death of all their children, and still walk 100 miles to an aid station where it is altogether possible that more of the same awaits them. Yet a small business owner in England will shoot his children, their pony, their mother and himself rather than face losing his builders' merchants or whatever. It's all very wrong.


And I agree that the taxes should be collected - and I think you've wildly underestimated the amount given what Tesco, Vodafone, Google, News International, and the Guardian alone have gotten away with. It's disheartening that as consumers we fail to punish these companies, and shameful that successive governments have done squat about it. But it's also a detail. Recessions aren't caused by tax avoidance, and they wouldn't be very likely to get fixed by getting the bastards - although this is always worth doing anyway. We shouldn't be any less angry about evasion in the good times than in the bad.

This whole mess was caused by delaying the inevitable recession cycle through loose monetary policy in the west, and inflation busting currency manipulation in the east, more than anything else. Trying to stave off a small recession by loosening credit is what forces investors to search desperately for a place to invest their money and get a some kind of return (sub prime mortgages this time, golf courses and hotels last time). And the investors in turn had to find places to put money because the Germans, Italians, Japanese and the Chinese government were all saving up too much personal cash, giving US and British pension funds nowhere to put their cash. (FYI, the US and GB have over 100%GDP saved up in private pension funds - Germany has some absurdly low number, I think it was 16%). It's the distorting influence of these cash flows - amounting to many trillions of dollars - that makes recessions happen, and also drives growth the rest of the time.

So sure, you can adopt a quixotic policy (as per mister G. Brown and many others) of hoping that recessions are part of history, something to be magicked away by omnipotent technocrats and impossibly perfect policy. Or you can be unreasonable and claim the universe promised you that you will never suffer a financial reverse in your entire cossetted life. Or you can adopt a phlegmatic view; some of this [LIFTED] has to happen now and then, in a perfect world governments, corporations and individuals would all be sensibly prudent and this stuff wouldn't have to get too nasty. But above all, nobody should be dying from it, not here, not in Somalia, nor anywhere in between.

We sometimes use an art-working company for new food products coming in to the UK for the supermarkets to look at.

Drop me a PM with your details and I'll talk to James to see if he is interested.

I think we generally agree, although just because others have it worse does not mean that any of it is right.


I must have misunderstood your earlier post, I got the impression you were saying that we should just have a stiff upper lip and not complain.

I think the point that one argument makes is that actually 'some of this [LIFTED]' does not have 'to happen' and that there should be a change to the structure of a society that allows time and again for this to happen, for many to feel like they are at the mercy of those with money and power.

The better we can make our own society the better a position we will be in to help other societies that suffer more immediate daily threats.

Done. Thanks John!

i was reading something after a question time program in regard to globalisation
which in effect increased the available working population for companies operating globally by some 400%

also these huge global company's are outside the remit of national Govt.
in the global sense national Govt. of any and all nations are relegated to the role of local councils
the large global companies can bypass any and all national Govt. administrations to control them ...

For sure. We're the beneficiaries of all the improvements that previous generations have made, and for all that progress things aren't anywhere near perfect. So our duty is to make more progress and let the generations that come try to perfect things until one day in the distant future somebody notices that everything has become good enough, and those guys can leave it all as it is.

I think the first stage of that is happening all around us right now, but sadly many of us resent it. The most important, and historically most atypical disparity, lies not between wages of the average citizen and of the rich few (this imbalance is historically usual), but between the wealth of the rich and poor nations. It's always been the case that the better organised nations had higher gdp per capita, as is true now, but between 1800 and 2000 that gap grew to massive and unsustainable levels. Until that gap narrows significantly, the low earners within the high wage societies will not be in a strong position due to their competition with peers within low wage ones. You can see this even in China where factories are starting to outsource low paid work to cheaper countries still such as Indonesia and Vietnam.

Ultimately, the same job shouldn't pay less money for any reason. A man shouldn't earn more than a woman for no reason other than gender, and I shouldn't earn more than a network engineer in India just because I am in London. Luckily for me I do, because on their wages I would starve. But both of those facts are deeply unfortunate for the world, so it will have to change eventually.

When the ability of the rich to leverage international wage disparities reduces, then the ability of the same guys to remove money from the worker and keep it for themselves diminishes. That does of course leave us with a choice to make. We may choose to not let the disparity even out, but rather to use protectionist measures so that money doesn't move between countries very easily. We can protect our steel industry by imposing tariffs on imports. And then we can protect our washing machine manufacturers in the same way - which we would have to do because they would compete with foreign manufacturers who had much cheaper steel than they did and so on. As nobody has actually argued for that, I won't bore us all to death with an essay on why we shouldn't do that. Hopefully we can all agree that it's better to let the Chinese grow rich so that they can afford to buy our expensive goods and services instead. And then we can look forward to the incidental benefits that situation brings us all (even though we won't actually be alive to see the full effect).



I see the point, but I think it's overstated. Multinationals can be held accountable by any and all governments within whose territory they trade, and in some cases that has global effects for them. At present this isn't leveraged very widely, but it does happen:
The US is more diligent than other countries when dealing with corruption cases. Which is why BAE forked over a big sum to them and a pitiful dribble to us.
Conversely, the UK is a leading centre for civil contract disputes, which is why Russian billionaires sue each other here. The law of the land in their own country is corrupt, where it even applies at all (ask BP what they think about that right now).
Anti trust investigations are much more equitably applied though, even Russia does them, and for large mergers that is quite a big headache.
Britain has just done a really poor deal with Switzerland over tax evasion, Germany and the US have been much more aggressive - as could we have been.
Companies have effectively applied European regulations on things like using lead components in electronics globally because the cost of complying here but not there is higher than just applying it globally anyway.

Globalisation of companies needs to be accompanied by globally consistent regulation and enforcement, which we are a long way short of, and for which there is limited appetite just yet. But an increasingly global economy makes this sort of thing that much more desirable, and if the desire is there, then there is nothing globocorps can do to prevent it - in the longer term. In the short term though, they mostly win for now.