Lord Rees-Mogg - Times Online - WBLG

Infant charities need protection from tax

Startups are notoriously difficult in business, though they are one of the most important ways of introducing business innovations.  They are equally important in the field of charities.  Under the traditional rules which governed charities in British law, there was a presumption that education was a charitable activity and therefore free from taxation of the fees that they charged.  On this basis, private schools and private arts institutions could gain this charitable relief from the startup point.

If the London Stock Exchange is for sale, why not the Bank of England?

The London Stock Exchange is now the object of a bidding battle, with Nasdaq, a New York stock exchange, making an unsolicited bid into a final offer, and all sorts of speculative financiers buying their shares.  This is all very exciting for the City, but is it good for Britain?

Do we know what we are afraid of?

I find the value of blogs is that they allow me to ask questions to which I genuinely do not know the answers.

There has been a global fall in stock markets, ranging from 10 per cent in most European markets to nearly 20 per cent in Japan.   This is not a panic, but it is the worst scare in six years.  Yet there are two theories to account for it, which cannot both be right.

Will gold go to $1,000 an ounce?

For the last five years I have been forecasting rises in the gold price and it has in fact more than doubled since Gordon Brown made his first gold sales.  Now the price has risen to $624 an ounce, a rise of almost 5 per cent in the previous week.  This has happened despite profit taking, though some profit taking is to be expected after any long rise.

The French say 'non' to Adam Smith

This is the first piece I have written specifically for Times Online.  I shall not be writing pieces at the same length as my existing weekly column, which will continue to be published on Mondays.  However, the subjects will inevitably overlap.  My interests have not changed, nor has my normal routine, so the writing that develops from them will be bound to deal with some of the same material.

I am particularly interested in the interface between economics and politics which I have been writing about since I joined the Financial Times as a trainee in 1952.  In the 1950s I worked on the F.T. with Nigel Lawson and Shirley Williams.  I see both of them nowadays in the House of Lords, and we are still discussing the same subjects, fifty years later.