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Great Newsnight report on the Current Account deficit
SirMickTravis
Posts: 2,607 Forum Member
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They had a great chart showing our record curret account deficit - the worst since figures have been available since the War. More alarmingly the two previous record deficits were in 1976 when we went to the IMF and 1989 at the end of the Lawson boom. A complete idiot from Oxford Economics thought this didn't matter. Selling houses to rich foreigners was to his mind no different to selling them cars or anything else. When Evan Davis pointed out that houses were in fixed supply he just said we could always build more of them! In a country as densely populated as our own. And he couldn't seem to understand that people buy our cars because they want to drive them. They buy our houses because they think they're a good investment. If that changes things could alter very quickly.
But there's a bigger point here. We need to ask why all this capital is flooding in. There's a strong feeling that London is the global capital of money laundering. So we continue to fund our lifestyles off the back of 3rd world potentates hiding their ill gotten gains in London mansions they pay virtually no tax on!
Here's a good TED talk on how London property fuels worldwide corruption.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9CQZmN1Mhs
But there's a bigger point here. We need to ask why all this capital is flooding in. There's a strong feeling that London is the global capital of money laundering. So we continue to fund our lifestyles off the back of 3rd world potentates hiding their ill gotten gains in London mansions they pay virtually no tax on!
Here's a good TED talk on how London property fuels worldwide corruption.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9CQZmN1Mhs
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That information is confidential.
Whose authority on the subject would you except?
It might help the OP if you outlined a list of bodies upon whose evidence you'd be satisfied with
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/police-lack-resources-to-carry-out-moneylaundering-investigations-10309052.html
Good article on London property. This bit struck me particularly:
'One Hyde Park is the glass and steel embodiment of the second argument. London’s most expensive block, where flats go for up to £140m apiece, it juts out of Knightsbridge. Qatari money paid for its building. Russians, Kazakhs, and Ukrainians have bought apartments there – although how many of them live there is up for debate. A 2011 investigation by our sister paper the Observer revealed that only nine of the 62 homes then sold in the block were registered for council tax – and five of those were paying the half-price reduced levy for second homes. The following year, journalists at the Guardian found that 80% of the residences had been bought by offshore firms based in the British Virgin Islands.'
So our economy is kept going by foreign investors coming into London and buying property (for whatever reason). But of course this simply pushes up the cost of housing in the capital so the average property is 15-20 times median earnings. This is crazy. It cannot and surely will not continue.
In Westminster the most you pay in council tax for the highest band H property is about £1350 - less than a pensioner couple pays for a typical Band D house in the vast majority of England.
If the oligarch lives alone they also get a 25 per cent single person discount so could pay less than £1k on a £60million fiat in annual property tax. It's an absolute joke - and far less than you would pay in any other major world city. They must all think it's hilarious - that the little people pay far more than they do.
Did you notice that after Mubarak and Ghaddafi were unseated it was found each had billions in accounts in London? Every foriegn dictator whose been deposed in the last 40 years has as well, even the Taliban did till it was frozen following 9/11. If you've got money City of London banks will do business with you, they don't care where you got it. Mervyn King describes the City as a 'cesspit'. He's wrong. Their nowhere near as nice as that.
It's such a given that i don't think there's any need to. The vast majority of Russian Oligarchs with all their corrupt profits from the broken-up national industries of the old Russia chose to move to London for a very good reason.
I haven't quoted it, but mRebels post #9 above is i believe very much the educated view on London and sadly i've not seen a thing to suggest any different. For a home for dodgy money, London is the new switzerland but far better/worse depending how you view it.
The thing about relying on all this hot money is it is fickle. Foreigners buy our cars because they like them and believe they are good quality. They are buying our houses because they think it's an investment that will go up in value. But if that changes they will leave in a flash. Unless of course we're dealing with people looking for a safe haven from the rule of law and corruption clampdowns.