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How to stop scams
Against an uncertain economic backdrop, one industry is booming.Internet fraudsters are scamming more and more victims worldwide. Using increasingly sophisticated methods, they are now stealing even from the most prepared among us.But while the number of online frauds and the volumes of money involved are increasing, so are the efforts to stop scammers.In the latest New Money Review podcast, I’m joined by Simon Miller, director of policy and communications at Stop Scams UK.In the podcast, we discuss:Why the volumes of scams and the money lost are significantly underreportedHow scammers target our insecurities and vulnerabilitiesWhy scams have shot up governments’ policy agendasWhy cross-sector data sharing can help prevent scamsShould all scam victims get their money back?Who should compensate scam victims—banks, tech firms or telecoms?Why fraudsters like digital paymentsWhy fintechs face higher compliance costsWhy combating scams requires global coordinationWhy artificial intelligence (AI) is both bad and good newsThe trade-off between privacy and fraud preventionHow to reduce the chances of being scammedWhy the Israel-Gaza war will drive new charity scams
From tax lawyer to political assassin
If you thought tax was boring, the latest New Money Review podcast will change your mind.Dan Neidle was a top corporate lawyer for 23 years—ending up as head of tax at London law firm Clifford Chance. But in 2022 he retired to set up a new think tank called Tax Policy Associates. Its aim is to improve UK tax policy and to improve the public understanding of the subject. This nerdish-sounding mission statement gave no indication of the political fireworks Neidle’s new venture was shortly to ignite. In July 2022, he accused then-Chancellor Nadim Zahawi of having avoided £4m in capital gains tax a few years earlier. It later emerged that Zahawi was under investigation by his own subordinates in His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), as well as being the subject of a separate inquiry the National Crime Agency (NCA).Other campaigners had tried to expose Zahawi in previous years but had been put off by threats of legal action—the UK’s infamous ‘strategic lawsuits against public participation’ (SLAPPs), which often silence investigative journalists.But when Neidle received similar threats from Zahawi’s lawyers he called the UK Chancellor’s bluff. He went ahead and published his investigations. Zahawi was forced to back down.In September 2022, incoming UK prime minister Liz Truss replaced Zahawi as Chancellor and gave him another ministerial position. But in January 2023, Rishi Sunak, who had replaced Truss in October, fired Zahawi from the UK government. Citing the tax investigation which Neidle had been instrumental in bringing to light, Sunak said Zahawi had committed ‘a serious breach of the Ministerial Code’.Tax Policy Associates’ more recent investigations touch on such sensitive topics as UK inheritance tax, the ‘carried interest’ tax exemption enjoyed by private equity firms and the alleged involvement of the family of another Conservative politician, Michelle Mone, in a cover-up relating to government contracts for personal protective equipment (PPE) during the coronavirus pandemic. In the half-hour podcast discussion, I quiz Dan Neidle on a number of tax-related topics, including:Separating the goals of tax policy from the tax rulesWhether the complexity of tax codes aids illicit behaviourWhy the make-up of UK tax revenues has changed remarkably little over timeWhy the Liz Truss tax-cutting experiment went wrongThree ideas to improve UK tax policy (value-added tax, income tax and land tax)PPE contract fraudFailures in the UK’s system of corporate transparencyWhy Companies House is a giant fraud robotWhy the UK remains a spectacularly successful venue for money launderingCoordinating the taxation of multinationalsWhy we should encourage the OECD’s ‘Pillar 2’ project
When's the next crash?
Financial markets go up and down. And they usually fall faster than they rise.But when does normal financial market turbulence tip over into a systemic collapse? How should policymakers prepare and how should they react?In the latest New Money Review podcast, I interview Steven Kelly, associate director of research at the Yale Programme on Financial Stability. The programme’s mission is to create, disseminate and preserve knowledge about financial crises.In the podcast, we cover:What defines a systemic financial crisis?The common threads of financial crisesDeposits, short-term debt and bank runsThe historic scale of the 2023 US bank failuresHow safe is the global banking system?Safe assets, repo and US TreasuriesThe impact of rising interest rates on financial stabilityThe risks in stablecoinsSustainability, ESG and climate riskWhy current conditions are ‘stable but fragile’
Why monetarism is common sense
In the latest episode of the New Money Review podcast I’m delighted to welcome Tim Congdon, an economist and leading advocate of monetarism.After a successful career in the City, Tim became founder and chair of the Institute of International Monetary Research at the University of Buckingham.I’ve followed his work for over three decades. In the early 1990s, when I was working as a bond fund manager, the UK’s central bank was keeping interest rates at over 10% in an attempt to make sterling shadow the deutsche mark.Tim forecast that UK interest rates would soon fall from double figures, based on sluggish money supply growth that, in his view, meant a recession was coming.In the end, the Bank of England had to abandon its exchange rate target, sterling rates fell sharply and—as I had followed Tim’s advice rather than the consensus view—my fixed income clients did very well.Now we seem to be repeating the same, or at least a similar story. Listen to the podcast for more. In this episode, we discuss:Why Congdon became a monetaristHow money supply figures gave advanced warning of inflation in early 2020Why central bankers’ interest-rate-only macroeconomics is wrongWhy we should assess central bankers’ performance against money supply targetsWhy quantitative easing was necessary in 2008/09Why low money supply growth now presages a recessionWhy we will soon see falling interest ratesWhy the basic principles of monetarism are common senseHow money supply targeting could help dampen boom/bust cyclesWhy CBDCs could affect the way we measure money
The legal fiction that drove colonialism
We often look at colonial empires as territories gained and occupied by nation states. But across four centuries, colonialism has above all been the business of companies, says my interviewee in the latest New Money Review podcast.Philip Stern is the author of a new book called ‘Empire, Incorporated’, in which he explores the role of the company in British colonial history.In it, he argues that corporations conceived, promoted, financed, and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were also invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Colonial companies were also relentlessly controversial, frequently in debt and prone to failure, says Stern.Like empire itself, says Stern, the joint-stock company was an elusive contradiction: it was both public and private; person and society; subordinate and autonomous; centralised and diffuse; immortal and precarious; national and cosmopolitan—it was a legal fiction with very real power.In the podcast, we cover:How private enterprise fuelled the growth of the British empireWhy the joint stock corporation underpinned colonial expansionThe political and legal advantages of the corporationWhy the 16th century saw an explosion in adventuring and speculationWhy many US states were formed as chartered corporationsHow the East India Company became the first ‘company-state’Why the 1880s/1890s ‘scramble for Africa’ followed corporate modelsTech giants and new virtual empiresNatural resources, private military companies and today’s geopolitics
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