Richard Exell

I once heard a ‘radio expert’ say that most successful business people would be diagnosed as sociopaths if they were not rich. He confirmed my prejudices, so I was reluctant to decide this was one of those media facts – announced confidently, but with nothing to substantiate them. Today’s news has me wondering whether he was right after all.

First, there was yesterday’s news that nationalised Royal Bank of Scotland is going to pay out £1.3 billion in bonuses. More than 100 RBS bankers are going to get bonuses of over a million pounds. They lost £3.6 billion last year, but that was “lower than expected” so that’s all right then.

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Nigel Stanley

The Guardian has an interesting report tucked into the financial pages today. US banks are already making big profits and paying big bonuses.

Despite calls for restraint in multi-million dollar pay packages, Wall Street bonuses jumped by 17% to $20.3bn (£13bn) for 2009 as America’s financial services industry rebounded swiftly from the credit crunch to healthy profitability, according to New York’s tax department…

DiNapoli said the total bonus pool was down by about a third on 2007, when the financial crisis had yet to wreak unprecedented havoc on the markets. But he said Wall Street was on track to make an aggregate profit of as much as $55bn for 2009, a remarkable recovery after a $43bn loss in 2008.

Together with hedge funds and other instituions they can easily afford to pay a Robin Hood Tax.

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A Wednesday morning musical treat for you. Here at ToUChstone, we’re big fans of Jonathan Mann, a very talented US singer/songwriter, whose innovative solution to recession-imposed unemployment was to start writing a new song every (yes, every) day, making money from commissions, downloads, ringtones, anything (a kind of “weddings, parties, bar mitzvahs anything 2.0″).

As he’s already aced the popular ‘liberal economist biographies’ genre, with “Hey, Paul Krugman“, and “Come on Nouriel“, we asked him if he’d be interested in giving his own take on our current pet issue of financial transaction taxes. About 12 hours later, this is it:  Song/day number 419, The Robin Hood Tax.

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• The Independent View: The Robin Hood Tax
  Owen has a guest post on the case for a financial transaction tax at Lib Dem Voice

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Philip Pearson

Which jobs are threatened by the transition to a low-carbon economy, and how can we ensure a ‘just transition’ that protects jobs and livelihoods in the process? A Carbon Trust briefing today shows that the problem of “carbon leakage” is small – perhaps 2% of our emissions. And it is capable of resolution with the right mix of interventions such as free emissions permits to sectors at risk, public/private investment, and a carbon “border tax” on imports.

But meanwhile, in America, eight leading Democrat Senators from coal and steel states are now warning that “imprudent regulation” of greenhouse gases “may squander critical opportunities for our nation, impeding the investment necessary to create jobs.”

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John Wood

The Trade Union Advisory Committee to the Organisation on Economic Co-operation and Development (TUAC to their friends) have analysed three recent studies into transaction taxes published in Austria, France and the US. They’re interested in the potential of a Financial Transaction Tax in tackling what they’ve identified as a global public good resource gap – the difference between deficits as a result of the financial crisis and bailouts and international spending pledges to meet targets on poverty and climate change.

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Kate Bell

Gingerbread, the national charity working with single parents is launching a new campaign today to ‘lose the labels’ – the stereotypes and stigma still too often attached to single parenthood.

We’ve secured a pledge from Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg to challenge prejudice against single parents in the run up to the election. We’ve also written to editors of leading newspapers and broadcasters news to ask them to do the same. We’re going to be highlighting good and bad practice on our website and asking all MPs and prospective parliamentary candidates to sign up. We hope that by highlighting the continuing distortions of the debate about single parenthood we’ll also contribute to a more sensible conversation on the issues of poverty and welfare reform.

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Adam Lent

Rewind almost three years and the trade union movement was embroiled in a bitter media spat with the private equity industry. In a portent of something much bigger, private equity firms were accused of playing fast and loose with high levels of debt to buy up companies they neither understood nor cared for in order to make a quick buck.

Trade unions are used to being patronised and dismissed. There have always been countless armchair policy-makers with an infinitely greater understanding of the real world (most of them have their own blog these days). But the ridicule aimed at the unions in the Summer of 2007 was often intense.

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Brendan Barber

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• BBC white-washes Geoffrey Howe’s record on unemployment
  Paul Cotterill at Liberal Conspiracy pulls the Beeb up on their recent political history

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