Germany pro or anti austerity? Doing better or worse than UK?
Anti austerity article talks about Germany forcing austerity on rest of Europe and killing recovery.
[i]This is just a tax, you end up paying a bigger mobile phone bill as the companies need to recoup their expenditure.[/i]
You can't have it both ways. The loss to the treasury (if we'd have held onto the gold) was about £3.3Bn, now as it happens the treasury did buy the long term foreign currency bonds that they planned to do (just not as many 🙂 ) and they did do quite well up to about 2008 (funnily enough), so the 'loss' could have been worse. The 3G auction raised £22Bn over it's expected price. Balancing out the two, 'we' came out of it pretty well, admittedly no thanks to Brown but I doubt a Tory CotE would have fared any better.
germany
the fourth-largest by nominal GDP in the world, and fifth by GDP (PPP).
agriculture: 0.8%,
industry: 28%,
services: 71.2% (2012 est.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Germany
uk
world's sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and eighth-largest by purchasing power parity.
Agriculture: 0.7%
Construction: 6.3%
Production: 15.2%
Services: 77.8% (2013 est.)
was tring to think of a similar sized country with a dominant financial services sector
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_Kingdom
just shows the how hard it is to compare 2 countries!
Prices are set on competition levels, so just depends on what they are able to charge, some reduction in profit probably.
This is fine and dandy, but when everyone in market buys one, the pressure on prices is less present - the point being tax at a corporate level is either a tax on shareholders, employees or consumers - someone has to lose out when a company spunks a load of cash to a government. In this case it probably caused a few companies to go bust - so shareholders lost out - but also reduced competition. Some argue it was responsible for the telecoms crash which had a knock on effect to the whole economy. The point being it raises money for the government but there is a substantial cost which is shared ultimately between the stakeholders and maybe in this case more widely.
You can't have it both ways. The loss to the treasury (if we'd have held onto the gold) was about £3.3Bn, now as it happens the treasury did buy the long term foreign currency bonds that they planned to do (just not as many ) and they did do quite well up to about 2008 (funnily enough), so the 'loss' could have been worse. The 3G auction raised £22Bn over it's expected price. Balancing out the two, 'we' came out of it pretty well, admittedly no thanks to Brown but I doubt a Tory CotE would have fared any better.
I'm not - you are comparing apples and oranges - one (gold) is a matter of asset allocation - the other (3G) is the sale of an asset, the future cost of which will be borne as noted above.
