Personal Finance and Investing

Todays Telegraph led with the claim that workers are 40% better off in public sector. The claim that public sector wages are out of control is based on this research from Policy Exchange. But in February the IFS concluded (in research which Policy Exchange have referenced, and therefore presumably read) that the gap was 6%, that there were still methodological reasons which limited the validity of this estimate (such as the impossibility of controlling for gender discrimination in the private sector and the difficulty of taking into account actual ability rather than proxy measures for productivity) and that:

Before the financial crisis, public sector employees were, on average, paid at levels roughly in line with their private sector counterparts once observed differences in skill composition were taken into account.

So, have Policy Exchange managed to improve on the IFSs methodology?

A brief review of their report suggests that they have not.

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On the surface, this book seemed like the ideal read. It has a strong premise of how to create multiple streams of income using debt leverage. That is a great premise and one that we follow and put into practice every day. It was such a disappointment that this book failed to deliver on such promise. We really wanted to like this one, but at the end of the day, we simply cannot recommend it.

Let’s go into the good things first. Those who are new to real estate investment will get a lot of information from just the few chapters. The book covers 1031 transfers in a way that makes them so easy to understand. S

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In forex uk currency trading action, the GBP produced an additional run for 1.6600 because the advanced 1Q GDP document for the U.K. revealed a 0.1/2 Percent expansion in the rate of growth, however deficit of momentum to test the annual high (1.6598) probably will retain the exchange rate inside a slim range in the North American trade as the Federal Reserve is scheduled to announce its interest rate selection at 16:30 GMT.

As the U.K. Read more…

Tonight the Global Poverty Project held a reception (with tap water and food for only 33p per person) to mark the first Live Below the Line week in the UK. Live Below the Line encourages people to live for a week spending less than £1 a day on food and drink. Not to pretend we know what global poverty means, but to encourage people to know more about global poverty and take more action to end it.

The TUC is backing Live Below the Line as part of our strategy to raise awareness of international development and the Millennium Development Goals. Lord Jack McConnell, one of the speakers at the reception, and a participant, spoke about the potential to end global poverty in a generation.

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