Merryn Somerset Webb

Non jobs in the public sector: can we get rid of them?

I went on the Today Programme last Saturday along with several other regular contributors to give one money saving tip to our new government. Mine was to do with pensions. You can read the full argument in the piece below. But the core idea is pretty simple – to cut the amount we allow people to save into a pension to an amount that allows them to save enough to prevent them from being a burden on the tax payer in their retirement and no more. Obviously they can still save as much as they like outside a pension – just not in such a way that it is subsidized by the taxpayer. I suggested cutting the amount everyone is allowed to save every year to a not exactly mean £20,000 something that could save £6-7bn a year. Some of the other speakers came up with slightly more radical ideas (Simon Jenkins thinks we should dump the armed forces in their entirety) and some rather less radical. But when I then looked at the next day’s Sunday Times I began to wonder why we were bothering with the out of the box thinking at all. Why? Because the paper listed a horrible train of non jobs still on offer in the public sector at vast salaries. 

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New PM must use Greece as cover to cut the deficit now

I went on Moneybox Live on Saturday morning (you can listen to the show here). The conversation was, as one would have expected, all about the impact of the hung parliament on markets. Just how big a deal is it? I went in under the impression that not only is it a whoppingly big deal, but that everyone understood that.

Not so. The other two guests seemed to think that as long as sometime this week there was a "clear plan" for cutting the deficit, all would be well. They didn't even think said plan needed to show the cuts biting now. No, as long as said plan showed things getting going next year, that would be enough.

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How to take cover as Europe implodes

I have a friend who has recently discovered day trading. She looks for the biggest fallers in the stock market over a month, checks that the shares that have fallen more than 50% (of which there are always a few) aren't going bankrupt right away, and buys them. Then she waits for them to go up and sells them. Last week she made 60%. She says it is fool-proof.

I'm wondering how she knows something isn't going to go bankrupt right away. I'm also thinking that if she does have a special method of doing so – and if risk makes her happy – I might introduce her to the sovereign bond markets.

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Never mind Greece, all of Europe is on the brink

Greece has "come to the brink of the abyss" said poor President Papoulias of Greece yesterday. And indeed it has. There can be little better exemplification of the inability of populations outside Japan to accept deflation, than the petrol bombings that killed three in Athens yesterday.

The Greeks may by now understand how they got into their current situation (a mixture of complacency, profligacy and malfeasance) but that doesn't mean they have much intention of going along with the rest of Europe's plan to get them out of it. And you can see why: as is always the way, tax rises and spending cuts are going to hit the poor more than the rich, forcing down living standards after a long period in which everyone had assumed things would keep getting better for ever.

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