Many of us would like to see into the future, but this may not always be comfortable viewing. The London meeting of MDRT (Million Dollar Round Table) http://www.mdrt.org provided this or an educated guess as good as any. Economically the UK is in a similar situation to the years after WW2 when there was a long period of austerity with a dullness and greyness that persisted through the 1950s. There is not going to be any bounce out of recession and we are in for the “lean & mean teens” after the naughty noughties. Economies will dip in and out of recession rather like a non-swimmer just being able to stay afloat. Over the next 20 years or so there will be a transfer of about US$30 trillion from the old West to the growing East where there is no talk of recession. The East is increasingly able to do without the old West (that’s us in Europe and the USA) and was classically illustrated at the recent Copenhagen Climate Conference where the Chinese representative didn’t bother to turn up sometimes. They are purchasing energy and materials from Africa for example, 40 years forward in some cases as they clearly see an increase in raw material and energy prices.
Back to the old West again and the run-off of Lehman hedge fund transactions continues where one US$200 million deal has three parties claiming to be the beneficiaries – a variation perhaps on the old military saying that “Victory has 100 fathers while Defeat is an orphan”. Worldwide hedge fund transactions total between US$60 trillion (that word again) and US$600 trillion which is US$600,000,000,000,000. This is more than halfway to my very first quadrillion (1,000 trillion) which would be written 1,000,000,000,000,000. Glad I taught my kids Monopoly. When these wonderful deals work out, the punters make loadsamoney but one wonders how much tax they will pay? If things go pear shaped, then everyone else (that’s us again) eventually pick up the tab as this level of business can just overwhelm banks’ capital. The lunatics really have been running the asylum.
Tax guru Danby Bloch’s http://www.taxbriefs.co.uk/ngen_public/article.asp?aid=89 presentation reminds us that counting days when you are in the UK is not enough if you really want to make yourself non-resident for UK tax purposes as stated in the recent case of Robert Gaines-Cooper http://www.accountancyage.com/accountancyage/news/2258003/gaines-cooper-loses-court where the HMRC Commissioners, High Court and now the Court of Appeal have said that living in the Seychelles since the 1970s and not spending more time in the UK than the tax rules allow, is still not enough to free him from UK tax. Reasons for the judgement are that he is still very much involved with the UK and include, big house here, children at school here and going to Ascot! Life can be really unfair sometimes. Wonderful quote here from a learned judge years ago ”If the intention of a taxpayer is to play cat & mouse with the Inland Revenue, then there is no intention on the part of the Revenue (now HMRC) to play the part of the mouse!”
From Tax or Money Management to Time Management, with two different approaches. One from Mark Forster http://www.markforster.net/ author of three books on time management and the other from Penny Power founder of the ecademy social network www.ecademy.com Penny has no “to-do lists” and many of her tasks are e-mail-related. As she puts it, if they are worth doing, they are “worth an appointment”. These used to get done on every other Friday and allocated into half hour slots, but the model has now developed. Now these tasks get slotted into gaps on different days when waiting for trains or between appointments. Result, no backlog.
Strange how things go round in circles, with a nice surprise at a family dinner where I am presented with a copy of eldest daughter’s first book. Ready for ILETS by Sarah Emsden-Bonfanti, MacMillan Exams new English language workbook for foreign students (ISBN 978-0-2304-0102-0). Illustrating how international publishing has become, MacMillan Exams is based in Oxford while the books themselves were printed and bound in Thailand. All developed from exam reviewing work for Cambridge ESOL who now manage the Cambridge English Language Proficiency exams studied by many people who come to learn, study and work in the UK. The Cambridge examination empire also includes Cambridge University Press (CUP) of which, more later.
One has to admire ladies these days. Penny Power is the mother of three while Sarah’s book was completed over 18 months during which time she produced my second grandson. CUP was my first venture into paid employment, via a paper round – the start of many a schoolboy’s ambition. A ten minute cycle ride and then a short cut through the railway yards where most wagons were overfull with coal, got me to W H Smith’s on the main platform. My load of about 50 papers all had to be delivered before school, and delivered here meant put in the letter box rather than thrown onto the doorstep or the drive. Most deliveries were to lovely detached mansions in Brooklands Avenue and included CUP. Schoolboy logic being what it is, I could never quite get my head round delivering newspapers to a printing press – surely they were capable of printing their own? CUP’s reading was The Times and The Financial Times where in those pre-Murdoch days, the former didn’t have anything vulgar like news on its front page.
Nearby were local Government offices where a few of my schools chums ended up and who have probably taken early retirement now on gold-plated pensions. Father also worked there in pre-BT days in Post Office Telecommunications when telephone exchanges were mechanical, demand for exchanges and telephone lines was consistently underestimated, often resulting in waiting lists for a telephone line. Most memorable were the grand Christmas parties with gloriously politically-incorrect Punch & Judy shows where the script included throwing the baby out of the window http://www.punchandjudy.com/cvdcscript2/page9.html conjurers who relied on mechanical skill rather than technology and Father Christmases who did not have drink on their breath.
Perhaps life was more fun then?