UK
Thank you, Darling, you’ve only gone and messed up London’s long-term chances of squeezing New York out of the global financial centre hotspot.
The latest sweeping changes to our tax system have scuppered the City’s chances of biting further into the Big Apple’s dominance, according to one economist writing in The Times.
London’s growing pre-eminence has been giving New York the jitters for some time. But the sad demise of the tax regime that favoured both foreign workers and small businesses spells bad news for the City’s financial prowess, reckons The Hudson Institute’s Irwin Stelzer.
Stelzer says the fixed annual fee of 30k for non-doms and the elevation of Capital Gains Tax from 10% to 18% has made London less attractive to investors and presented the Big Apple in a juicier light.
To add insult to injury, Stelzer says New York is a more attractive place to live. Forget over-priced condos, the $2 pound and the proximity of Donald Trump, he says New York is a) cheap, b) safe, and c) more vibrant. By comparison, London is said to be expensive and dangerous.
Is Stelzer (who lives in London but is evidently an NYC exile) right? Has Darling given the City a kiss of death, or was his budget merely the start of a nice friendly hug?
darling is a mediocre guy with little intellectual capacity to understand who is paying for his salary in the first place. forget about biting that hand that feeds you, this was about sheer stupidity
Yes, it’s quite a shame that the long buried archaic socialism that Blair managed to squeeze for a while in the Labour Party is back and stronger than ever with Brown and his gang. They’d better really believe in welfare and state intervention because the consequences of what they’re doing will be hard to swallow. At no time the highly skilled migrants (usually non-domiciled and mostly working in the City) that they manage to attract over the past few years will be off somewhere else. Nowadays the alternatives are beyond New York, e.g. Singapore and Hong Kong where living standard is much higher than both western cities.
For all the talk about vision this Government has no strategy. Merely short-term tactics for political point scoring. Darling’s poorly thought out assault on the City was, unfortunatly, business as usual. The City will have to be at its resourceful best to avoid the obstacles of stupidity placed in its path.
How can anybody be so stupid to suggest that THEIR industry is so important that its senior executives should pay less tax than the rest of us. Darling’s only mistake has been not to tax capital gains at 40% – at 18% this still gives a minority a free ride on the backs of the rest of us.
Ronald… taxing capital gains @ 40% ??? you certainly dont know what you are talking about then!!
Capital gains tax at 40%!?!? Who would risk investing any money then? History (last 100 years in the US) clearly shows how dangerous it is to reduce or kill the capital gains/income tax spread. Maybe someone from the city could send Darling a copy of “Economics for Dummies”
Stop whining – collapse of ‘The City’ will unmask all the trashing that’s been dealt to ‘The Real Economy’ in the last twenty years. Bring it on!
HOT HOT HOT mOney I wonder if the BoE and the The CITY is feeling the chill that is certainly blowing from across the Atlantic and is freezing the 5-10% of peolpe who really are making the money in the City the rest is just financing the ever cyclical and degraded london lifestyle that has as much to offer as a Swiss Banker to the UBS recruitment headcount – WHO is going to buy the subrime debt ??? Not the ECB !!!
Ronald if capital gains tax ever reached 40% you wouldn’t have a job anymore…
Keep at it, written English is quite tricky to master.
I think we should pay less attention to Stelzer than critizing Darling. “New York is a more attractive place to live” – only if you want to surrounded by STUPID Americans all day!
Although I don’t have a problem with a bit higher taxes on the VC, foreign workers per se, I would have felt better if those tax increases were to go towards decreasing other taxes, rather than increasing the welfare spend, cos government taking more and more from the economy and not putting anything back is gotta end in tears.