Threy are taking us to a totalitarian Command Economy, where every move, every action is state sanctioned.
Look around you and tell me I’m wrong.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NtSd0EOF3w

Now would be a real good time your Majesty.

There are tens of thousands of collective investment schemes including pension funds availabe to the UK retail investor. In this universe there are very speculative funds – Japanese Warrants say – and very unspeculative funds – most index trackers and passively managed funds.

An between these there are many other funds run under various philosophies – ‘value’ for example – where the manager does not set out to speculate but to make a decision about the absolute or relative value of a security and its propsects. He runs a fund as he knows that his analysis will not always succeed and that diversification reduces risk.

So it is entirely incorrect to lump all collectives managers as speculators. They are not.

This brings us to tax. You do not tax speculation. It just puts up the price of the risk insurance provided by the speculator and impoverishes us all. This applies to those that try and foresee the future course of oil prices and other commodities. What these ‘speculators’ actually achieve is the stabilisation of prices. It is Government interference and the actions of cartels like OPEC that cause price rises, not the speculators.

In fact you are only attacking a symptom not the cause. The excess of ‘speculation’ which you indentify, house prices, was driven entirely by excess liquidity, too much money at too low a price. To control house price ‘speculation’, make the government run sound money and ensure banks run sound capital and solvency ratios, both of which were undermined by Browns policies.

As to the taxation of land, I entirely agree. Introduce land value tax to replace private and business rates, CGT, VAT IHT etc etc. And that would go a long way, with sound money, to stopping stupid house price bubbles.

The only reason to have a pension is the employer contribution and that is clearly going to fall…

As of June 18th, the “Quantity of assets purchased by the creation of central bank reserves” was £92.72 billion:

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/markets/apf/results.htm

broken down as follows:

Commercial Paper £2.10 billion
Corporate Bonds £0.75 billion
Gilts £89.87 billion

ie 97% of the “quantitative easing” has been used to ensure that the government can continue to borrow in order to cover its budget deficit, which is now running at about a quarter of its expenditure.

The question is whether the Bank will agree to continue to help the government out for long enough – ie, until it can go into an election next spring claiming to have seen us through the recession – or the MPC will decide this autumn that there’s no longer any plausible justification for more “quantitative easing” of its financial difficulties.

My guess is that the MPC will look at the potential economic consequences of suddenly cutting off the supply of new money, and will decide to tail it off very gradually during 2010.

And on that basis, I’d say that Gordon Brown still has a fighting chance of winning the next election.