Next month’s Budget tax raids on capital have provoked a festival of creative doom-mongering on the fringes of Labour’s conference as well as in the columns of the business press. Most frequently voiced is the prediction that the 2,000 or so denizens of London’s private equity community who benefit from the ‘carried interest’ tax wheeze will pack their Louis Vuitton bags into their Chelsea tractors and form a convoy down the M20 towards continental tax havens.
We began searching for the farm of our dreams in Wales as we planned our escape from Surrey. The problem was, so did every other dreamer in London and the south-east of England. Since lockdown, the rush to perform ‘lifestyle change’ has sent the price of the valleys sky high. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Welsh farmers must be downsizing to townhouses in Chelsea. We were already quite down. It was sad to be served notice on the land we have been renting to keep our horses. We knew we had to buy our own land this time. We quickly ruled out staying here. Even if we could afford Surrey, we don’t want to carry on dodging stockbrokers on electric bikes. We settled on East Sussex as a possibility, because the builder boyfriend has family there.
The Bank of England has told commercial banks to prepare for the possibility of negative interest rates. This last hypothetical spanner in the toolbox of monetary stimulus — since rates are stuck close to zero anyway and quantitative easing through bond-buying programmes has diminishing effects — sounds weird and worrying but has already been in use in Europe for some time. Its intended effect is to push the commercial banks to lend more to business by penalising them for depositing cash with central banks. But what on earth does it mean for personal savers? The fact is that all monetary policy since 2008 has been designed to stimulate moribund economies and keep companies alive on a broad front — with collateral impacts on individuals.
