Sunday Posts

So the date is near and the signs are unmistakable. House sales have stagnated along with house prices. The Sterling is forever stuck in a zone of weakness. Shoppers are staying home. Supermarket shelves are showing the inflation and the Bank of England is trying hard not to see it. Unemployment is at an all-time low and too many shops are displaying 'Now Hiring' signs on the door, but none of that looks like good news. Though everyone has gone on holiday, and newspapers are living off the anti-semitism of Corbyn and Islamophobia of Boris Johnson, this is a summer of waiting in Britain: The Brexit curtain is about to - and inevitably - fall soon. But there are people in Britain for whom this is a summer of hope. For Theresa May, who loves the limbo, and indeed is its creator, knows that this is the best state to live in. For the two people who would want to see her gone, it is a time for optimism: For Boris Johnson, this would be the time to be unhinged and get back to em...

Of the life's two great certainties - death and taxes - we have not been doing very well with the latter. For an increasingly squeezed Middle Classes, facing declining real income, uncertain job prospects, costlier health-care and education and the very real possibility of never being able to retire, the fact that the rich does not pay much taxes may occasionally shock, but not paying taxes has indeed become one of the key signals of being rich. The newest metaphor of business - the cloud - is not just about technology, but of de-materialisation of taxes too. Obscure as it may be, the fate of taxes, and its consequence, may be one of the best ways to understand the global economy. Consider the two seemingly opposite conversations trending in the news in the last few weeks. One is that the Indian cabinet is considering imposition of a 'Google Tax', or, more correctly, an 'Equalisation Levy', an uniform charge on revenues made in India for all corporations not h...

Speechwriters never get the credit they deserve, but they have changed the course of history more than once. The metaphor of an 'iron curtain' or the uncertain promise of a 'tryst with destiny' etched in people's minds a concept that would become permanent by the power of imagery, even if the reality may have suggested otherwise. Fast forward to the society of ours where sound bites and TRP points trump any real experience, the speech writers are enjoying unprecedented powers to change destinies of nations: This comes with a huge responsibility that most are not even aware of.  So, for the future speechwriters, following the case of the person who would have made the Leader of the Conservative Party in Britain, David Cameron, promise to bring down immigration to 'tens of thousands' might be beneficial. Exploiting the resentment about immigration when an open-door policy had resulted in a surge of migration to Britain and the economy had just turned sou...

We are all consumers now. That's the mantra of the market: You are what you consume! And, we consume everything. The new keyword of our age is 'Taxpayers' money': It is not just the newspapers, but even the politicians, whose primary task is to squander it, use the term. The greatest public service we can all do is to buy stuff - as we are told by various pundits on TV shows - and not buying will mean recession and job losses. Our identities are shaped by brands we wear, indeed we shape our identities around the brands we wear - that's how the things are.  This is everywhere. The fastest growing nation, not a 'city', is Facebook. Such notions just come to us naturally: Nations are just a community which one can join and leave at will. Most people believe that nations don't matter anymore: Budgets and other pompous exercises have lost their magic. When in college, I listened to budget speeches and then went to hear various experts speaking about it i...

I spent the first half of the day attending an interesting discussion, hosted by the Social Market Foundation , an Westminster think-tank which is doing some interesting work on the transformation of the British Welfare State. This well-attended event, which was to be about Encouraging Responsible Universities, but somewhat ended up becoming a discussion on the University funding regime, drew participation from different sections of the British society, including Press, Businesses and various think-tanks and public intellectuals. In fact, there were people from only eleven universities, some of them on private capacities rather than as official representatives, which was rather interesting and was in fact pointed out in a question to the panel. However, the discussions were nonetheless worthwhile and threw some light on the current policy thinking on British Higher Education. The two keynote speeches of the day were delivered by Shabana Mahmood, the shadow Minister for Universities a...

The report on Banking is due, and the bankers are trying to do what they do best: Use the back-channel to flout the rules. In a sense, the only timely thing Alistair Darling has done in his entire career seemed to be the publication of his memoir, where he reminded people how fascinatingly arrogant the banking bosses are, and how they effectively demanded a bail-out and held the British government at ransom. They are indeed at it again, and there are various conciliatory signals coming from the Downing Street.  The key issue is whether the retail banks can be separated from the investment banking operations of these huge banks, whose combined balance sheets are five times the size of UK's GDP, and therefore, they can be stopped from gambling with Jo Public's money. During the last crisis, the bankers took their 'too big to fail' position as granted and did whatever they want to do, and governments across the world, fearing a meltdown of the system, simply handed th...