I am learning slowly about ZOOM in practice. For instance last Sunday my niece Katy, the joint cleverest person in the UK, arranged for twenty-one members of my immediate family to meet. The chat was pretty inconsequential and clogged up everybody’s telephone for close on an hour. But the exercise was worthwhile and explains why people’s phones are engaged at 5.00 p.m. and 6.00 p.m. on a Saturday or a Sunday.
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The business rates levy came about in the mid eighties. Some bright spark realised that high street business was set to be brisk for decades to come and the levy now stands at £30bn p.a.. This is hard to replace as high street retail outlets just keep dying and where their death is being caused by business rates.
Business rates were merely opportunistic scooping. As an idea, opportunistic scooping can be applied anywhere you like across the economy. For instance barmy revenues of premier league football clubs surely allows HMG to dip in for a quick billion or two. It is just that HMG could dip in anywhere else you care to name. Perhaps HMG will be dipping. I really do not know but I would mention that it is a deterrent to commercial success.
As regards taxing online shopping, HMG is already in a muddle. Amazon should be taxed on profits made in this country (Amazon are not) but it is not logical to tax the innovation of speedy delivery achieved by firms finding themselves thus engaged.
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I was a bit surprised by Clear Leisure’s vertical rise last week. But I still think CLP can in due course extend this run. It will swing round the outcome of court cases to emerge in late March.
It has been announced by CLP this morning that they have just issued c.100m new shares at 0.6p – and the share price has reacted favourably. It now seems that the Bitcoin craze may prove very profitable to CLP. It costs CLP less than $10,000 to produce a Bitcoin and, as I need hardly point out, Bitcoins sell like hot Bitcoins at $44,000 right now.
(That said, I cannot take Tesla’s holding Bitcoins as a serious investments.)