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By cutting VAT today from 17.5% to 15% along with various other smaller measures Alistair Darling has effectively placed a £20bn bet to try and save the economy. Whether he had any choice might be debatable, but if he gets this right you can guarantee he will be handsomely rewarded with lucrative consultancy contracts upon retirement from his position as Chancellor.
However get it wrong and he’ll probably continue to serve out this term before retiring on his MP pension, i.e. he is placing this with no risk of actually losing out himself. So there is a huge reward on offer with little financial risk attached to failure for him, isn’t that exactly what Brown and Darling have been saying is wrong with the banking sector?
Buying anti-virus protection for your computer is a bit like buying health insurance for yourself as statistically speaking you are unlikely to need it, but it helps you sleep at night. It’s fear, often fuelled by the makers of these products that drives you to buying them and it’s that fear that ensures I buy one of the premium products each year rather than one of the many free versions you can download.
Once you have one of these products towards the end of the annual license they’ll prompt you to renew directly with them, in fact they make it very easy to renew but in my particular case at a price of £39.99. Now that’s a ludicrously high price considering I can buy the 2009 version of the same software for just £27.97 on Amazon, so that’s exactly what I did a couple of weeks in advance of my current license expiring.
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It’s been years since we have anticipated a pre-budget report this much but given the current economic turmoil we can expect the current Chancellor Alistair Darling to possibly announce some interesting new measures.
However, Darling should be looking to the high street at times like this as they are said to be suffering more than most as the economy heads into a downturn. Their response was simple, slash up to 20% off everything with big names such as M&S and Debenhams leading the way.
Now if my visit to the local shrine of consumerism this evening is anything to go by, this financial stimulus action worked with shops full of buyers fighting over the retailers wares as if it was January 1st.
The oncoming recession seems to have had little effect on online bookmakers as the introductory offers encouraging users to sign up remain very good. So good in fact that I took advantage of another one of these offers last weekend.
This time they were offering a £50 free bet after the first £50 qualifying bet which I turned into a £30.70 profit using the matched betting technique. Then by placing a further ten £10 bets I received another £50 free bet which I was able to match out for a £32.27 profit.
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The Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, said that inflation, on the old Retail Price Index measure, will probably fall into negative territory next year for the first time since 1960, as mortgage rates come down.
This is great news for graduates as interest on student loans is based on the RPI measure of inflation. Whether this means loans could actually be reduced by negative inflation remains to be seen, but either way it looks like interest charges will be coming down although any benefit will not be seen until Sept-09, when next years student loan interest rate is set.
