Personal Finance

The first few months of a new year can be a stressful time financially. The Christmas holidays typically lead to depleted savings and higher credit card balances, while tax season is right around the corner. Unfortunately, for most us, this...

Bernie Sanders has proposed bringing back postal banking to save millions of unbanked Americans from the clutches of payday lenders. Bernie Sanders has proposed bringing back postal banking to save millions of unbanked Americans from the clutches of payday lenders....

ricochet64 / Shutterstock.com HSBC’s decision to keep its headquarters in London is good news for the British government. An exit would have been seen as a vote of no confidence by one of the world’s major financial institutions. However, it...

The current debate on tax reform in Australia is strong on rhetoric but largely devoid of hard evidence. Also missing are clear proposals from the government that can be assessed on their respective merits. The purported benefits of reform centre...

In the midst of the row about Google’s low tax settlement, former chancellor Lord Lawson came up with a radical proposal. In an era where multinationals can artificially shift profits around the world, he said that taxing those profits has...

January is a busy month for tax in the UK as millions of people struggle to complete their tax returns before the January 31 deadline. Meanwhile, HMRC, the tax agency, is dealing with public ire over its acceptance of Google’s...

Globalisation – and the global economic crisis – have contributed to the erosion of national tax bases and in recent years some of the biggest multinationals, among them Apple, Vodafone, Amazon, Google, Starbucks and Microsoft, have been scrutinised for their...

Reports indicating that Italy is close to establishing a bad bank prompted one wag to ask if Italy does not already have enough.  The country may be better served by setting up a good bank. The sharp sell-off in shares...

Presidential primary season is ebb and flow, and no one knows for sure who the Republican nominee will be, but it is becoming all too apparent of who stands the best chance: Ted Cruz, Donald Trump or Marco Rubio. Rubio...

In a world where financial experts are frequently proven badly wrong, it is hardly surprising that many people take charge of saving for their retirements themselves. The realities of the financial world do not make this easy, though. In addition,...

Many people are born into the middle class, but for those born in poverty the lifetime challenge is reaching middle class status. The definition of middle class status is a challenge in itself. People in poverty are often described as...

Ever since the introduction of computers into the retail banking system in the late 1950s, there has been a vision of a future world where cash is obsolete. The near death of personal cheques, increase in debit and credit card...

The knock-on effects of the meltdown in Chinese shares and the tension among major Middle East rivals are dominating the re-opening of the global capital markets after the New Year holiday.  The US dollar has recouped its earlier losses against...

With much anticipation and very little fanfare the Australian Taxation Office quietly released information about corporate tax entities with a total income of $100 million or more for the 2013–14 income year and how much tax they paid. With much...

As predicted, the US Federal Reserve has raised interest rates after nearly a decade, which means a slightly better rate of return for savers. Meanwhile in the UK, the Bank of England has kept the benchmark rate at a rock...