Up at the crack of dawn to get to London in time for the launch of the paperback version of ‘The Price of Fish’ at the City Business Library. Here I am with the two authors, my old friends Ian Harris (left) and Michael Mainelli (Right). It’s a brilliant book, full of thoughtful questions around ‘Wicked Economics’. I can thoroughly recommend it.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I’ve just received an e-mail from a friend, Mel Few. In it he quoted Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great Roman philosopher, politician, lawyer, and orator.

`The Budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public
debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and
controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest
Rome become bankrupt.

People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.`

Cicero said this way back in 55 BC. It could be said of today’s UK. 

Mel quips: “Evidently, we’ve learned bugger all over the past 2,069 years.”

When Walgreen, the US drugstore chain, announced it’s intension of acquiring Boots the Chemists, part of the plan was to shift its headquarters to Switzerland.

This caused fury in Obama’s White House, and they lambasted Walgreen for being another US company wanting to embark on the disloyal path of ‘Inversion’. Threats that patriotic customers would withdraw their custom unsettled the company’s board, and they announced they  would not pursue potential tax savings by shifting its headquarters overseas. Apparently, such a move was ‘not in the long-term interest’ of Walgreen.

What did Wall Street investors think? Shares of the US’s largest drugstore chain closed down more than 14.3% at $59.21 after the announcement. Interesting!

Could it be that the Street didn’t believe this, and that it was annoyed that in its analysis the board did not put shareholder value before the interests of politicians?

September 23rd, 2014. A date for your diary. The venue? Westminster Abbey.

1500 civil servants working for  Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs are invited to a service at the Abbey to … wait for it … `to recognise the department’s role over hundreds of years in collecting revenue.`

When I first heard of the service, I thought they were asking for FORGIVENESS. But no it’s`to celebrate the vital work we do in HMRC to collect revenue to fund public services and to benefit society as a whole.` Do they actually think their (often incompetent) enforced exactions from the public is virtuous, and that God is going to give them a pat on the back?

And wait for it: they get the Abbey free of charge, although public money (that’s your money) will cover the cost of staff time, as well as travel and subsistence!!!!!

So the next time you go to a church, mosque, synagogue or any other place of worship, demand tax relief on travel expenses … and see where that gets you.

I discovered a new word today. At least it’s new to me … backronym. It’s a clever play on acronym, the latter being an abbreviation formed from most/all of the initial letters of a phrase, and pronounced as a word. Apparently someone called Meredith Williams entered bacronym (a ‘k’ has since been added) for a competition in The Washington Post on 8 November 1983, as a portmanteau of back and acronym.

A backronym is taking a word in common use that is in some loose way connected to the topic at hand, and working backwards to form an acronym. One of the best I’ve come across is ACHOO: Autosomol dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst. This is sneezing when confronted by bright light.

As far as I can see there are two types of backronym. The first where the name is used as intended (ACHOO), or those that are invented post hoc, and are intended to be humorous. BING, for example, does not stand for Because Its Not Google. What does it stand for? DELTA: Doesn’t Ever Leave The Airport.

Of course, acronyms like LASER or UNESCO are not backronyms, but if we are honest most acronyms we see in the worlds of business and science are in reality backronyms. DARWIN for example is very popular. It can stand for: Data Analysis and Retrieval with Indexed Nucleotide/Peptide Sequences; Design Assessment of Reliability with InspectioN; Developmental Aeronautics Revolutionizing Wind-tunnels with Intelligent systems for NASA; Dynamic Analytical Reporting Web-based Interactive Navigator.

Anyway the backronym that sparked my interest was QUID, the Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination, proposed as a “space currency” by Travelex. I was researching for a talk on my off-planet banking idea, when I came across the 2007 PR campaign by the foreign exchange company … it was launching a new form of money for ‘space tourists’ that sensibly had no sharp edges, was chemically inert, and had other advantages over paper/metal money when in space. Sadly it never ‘took off’ (you may groan at the joke).

A ‘Quid Note’ of course was British slang term for the now defunct One Pound Note, withdrawn in 1988 after the pound coin was introduced in 1983. Some people still call the coin a quid, and use phrases like “quids in” meaning to be in profit.

If you know of any backronyms then please pass them on.

The Fraser Institute is an independent Canadian educational organisation that researches public policy. On August 11th they published their Consumer Tax Index that tracks the total tax bill of the average Canadian family. They add up the various taxes that a family pays to federal, provincial, and local governments, including income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, Employment Insurance and Canadian Pension Plan contributions, and “hidden” taxes such as import duties, profit taxes, and gas taxes.

Shock horror. They found that in 2013 Canadian families spent more money on taxes (42%) than on food, clothing, and shelter combined (36%). In 1961 the figures were 34% on taxes and 57% on food, clothing and shelter.