Month: March 2017

178 – HMRC – The Ultra rich and the not so rich

Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee thinks that the “government must take a tougher stance on taxing the very wealthy.” In 2009, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) set a specialist team to focus on the tax affairs of high net worth individuals (HNWIs is the jargon). At the time, HNWIs were defined as people with net assets…

Read more

177 – Inflation

For much of 2015, inflation barely existed. On the government’s chosen measure, the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), annual inflation oscillated between 0.3% and -0.1%. 2016 was a rather different story: the starting point was 0.3%, but by December prices were rising by 1.6% a year. The sharp rise over the year is mainly the result…

Read more