'Finance' Category

What Is Wrong With Insurance Companies?

Insurance is a requirement of living in the modern world. Most people will personally need household insurance and/or car insurance, and owners of businesses have a whole load of additional insurance products aimed at them such as professional indemnity and liability insurance, some mandatory, some optional. Given that this produces a large, fairly captive market, [...]

posted in Finance by The Internet Sheep

    • Surrey University to charge £9000

    Surrey University has announced it is to charge the maximum £9000 tuition fees for students, blaming the requirement on cuts to its teaching funds and capital grants. It joins Oxford, Imperial College, Durham and Exeter in announcing it will charge the highest level of fees. As covered by our earlier article “Tuition Fees: The Law [...]

    posted in Education, Finance, Politics by The Internet Sheep

    • Why do we pay VAT on petrol?

    Driving home from work yesterday, and noticing that I will have to fill up (again) soon, I was struck by the question, “why do I have to pay VAT on petrol”. VAT is considered to be a “luxury” tax, a tax on non-essential items. The only way for me to get to work and back, [...]

    posted in Finance, Politics by The Internet Sheep

    • Tuition Fees: The Law of Unintended Consequences

    The law of unintended consequences, sometimes defined as “a perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended (when an intended solution makes a problem worse), such as when a policy has a perverse incentive that causes actions opposite to what was intended.” (thanks to Wikipedia there) has swung into effect on the governments university tuition [...]

    posted in Education, Finance, Politics by The Internet Sheep

    • VAT hits 20%

    So, here we are waiting for VAT to go up to 20% and despite the Labour opposition lobbying for a delay, it’s pretty certain to go ahead. Of course this will push up fuel prices still further, as for some reason we have to pay VAT on fuel duty (where’s the value in that?). Now [...]

    posted in Finance, Politics by The Internet Sheep

    • Petrol Prices

    So here we are in an election year, and no-one seems to be talking about the price of a gallon of fuel. Despite the odd fluctuation, the price has steadily increased over the last year or so, and yet not one political party seems to want to comment publicly on this. Now, we all know [...]

    posted in Finance, Politics by The Internet Sheep

  • Politics in a Recession

    I was listening to breakfast television this morning, and two people debating who was at fault for the current economic situation (apparently it was “the other guy”), and it struck me that surely, this is exactly not what is needed at the moment. Would it not be better if politicians of all persuasions worked together [...]

    posted in Finance, Politics by The Internet Sheep

  • Why use a broker?

    It always seemed counter-intuitive to me – surely using an insurance broker for your insurance (car insurance, household insurance etc.) couldn’t be worth it unless you needed vast amounts of cover, or had really specific insurance needs – after all, the broker needs to take a cut, and the insurer still needs paying! However, having [...]

    posted in Finance by The Internet Sheep

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