The United States Government Accountability Office has been investigating tax havens and found that 83 per cent of the largest US companies have tax haven/ secrecy jurisdiction subsidiaries. Following on from this, The Tax Justice Network, with the help of Alternatives Économiques in France and SOMO in the Netherlands, has just produced a new report, "Where on Earth", with information that has never been published before. The study surveyed 97 of the largest quoted companies in the UK, the Netherlands and France. Of those companies all but one had tax haven subsidiaries. 99 per cent of the European quoted companies surveyed operate in tax havens. As in the USA, the largest user of tax havens in every country surveyed was a bank.

We are not shocked or even surprised. Through clever so-called transfer accountancy, profits can be made to disappear from places where taxes are high, and pop up where they are low. Given the present practice of taxing individuals and companies, this is precisely what anyone would expect if they gave the matter a moment's thought. What is to be done?

We don't normally advertise but this trailer for investors' advice publication MoneyWeek is using the same theories as we are.

The present gloomy state of the property market is a good time to take stock and ponder how best to take advantage of the investment opportunities that will start to open up as the cycle bottoms-out before the next upswing.

Many people are now ruefully coming to accept the truth of the title of this piece. Landowning can indeed damage your wealth. But in the past, land ownership has been the route to riches for generation after generation. What went wrong?

The UK should spend £90bn on 750,000 new "shovel-ready" jobs to stop the unemployment rate rising to 10pc, according to Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) member David Blanchflower. Professor Blanchflower, the only member of the MPC to vote consistently for interest rate cuts, suggested that drastic fiscal stimulus measures were needed to prevent job losses creeping up to 3m. At a speech last night at the University of Stirling, he said that monetary policy measures were not enough and direct intervention into the labour market was needed immediately. He advised the Government to embark on large-scale job creation scheme that could begin immediately, with "particular emphasis on shovel ready projects that can be started quickly", and many public sector bodies could be given increased funding for two years. Blanchflower also advocates raising the school leaving age to 18 to keep young people out of dole queues.

We have been saying much the same thing for months -

Gordon Brown’s economic recovery plans “lack a coherent strategy and timeline” and have yet to offer noticeable help to most companies, the UK’s leading business organisation warned on Thursday.