Tag Archives: tsi
Visiting hours at Zayed Mosque
Visiting hours at Zayed Mosque (Wam) / 24 June 2013 The Shaikh Zayed Grand Mosque Centre (SZGMC) has announced the official visit-ing hours for the holy month of Ramadan. The mosque will be open to all visitors from Saturday to Thursday between 9am and 2pm and closed on Fridays. Pub-lic tours will be offered at 10am and 11am. The interactive tours are led by one of the SZGMC official Tourist Guides and provide in-formation on the mosque, and its architecture and there is plenty of opportunity for visitors to ask questions. Ramadan is a very special time of the year in the UAE and visitors can expect to learn more about the significance of the holy month, its practices and the important role of the mosque. As a place of worship, visitors are requested to adhere to the ap-propriate dress code. Clear guide-lines can be found on the SZGMC website. Continue reading
Market Turmoil Forces G8 Leaders To Focus On Global Economy
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/97cbce80-d4ee-11e2-9302-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2X2HHQztS By Chris Giles in London, Robin Harding in Washington and Ben McLannahan in Tokyo Turmoil in financial markets is once again overshadowing a Group of Eight summit, turning world leaders’ attention away from trade, tax and transparency and back to the bumps on the road to recovery. With global bond markets swooning on the hint that the US might slow its money-printing operations and currency market volatility leaping as investors try to gauge the right level of the dollar and the yen, G8 leaders know the world economy remains a dangerous place. None of this was in Britain’s scripts for the summit. Only a month earlier, when the finance ministers and central bank governors of the Group of Seven met just outside London, George Osborne welcomed the breathing space financial markets were offering. “We are meeting at a time when financial market sentiment has improved and there are signs this is feeding through to an improved outlook in some of our economies,” the British chancellor said after the G7 meeting. Britain’s expectation of a relaxed chat about Abenomics, the name given to Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s three-pronged approach to reviving his country’s economy, alongside the perennial pressure on Germany to boost its domestic demand will now have a sharper edge. But the actor who has done most to influence the global economy in the past few weeks, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, will not even be at the G8 and will not speak until the day after it finishes. The Fed winds up its two-day meeting on Wednesday. Mr Bernanke will be at the centre of G8 discussions because it was his comment last month that the Fed might start to slow its third round of quantitative easing at one of its next few meetings that sent markets down. Next week is unlikely to be that meeting, given some continued weakness in the data, and uncertainty about the effects of tighter US fiscal policy. But bond investors have taken the words as a sign that the peak of bond prices had passed and the smart money should exit. Instead, Mr Bernanke is likely to sharpen the signal about when the Fed will taper QE3, while repeating as loudly as he can that it all depends on the economic data and there is a big difference between easing at a slower pace and actually tightening monetary policy. The simple reality for most Fed officials is that the economic outlook looks better now that it did when the Fed began QE3 last September. The unemployment rate has come down from 8.1 per cent to 7.6 per cent. Given that, it cannot make sense to keep easing monetary policy at the same pace forever, and Mr Bernanke’s “next few meetings” remark reflected that. To the extent that recent turmoil knocks a bit of froth out of global markets, the Fed will regard it as no bad thing. If G8 leaders are missing one key figure in the global economy, the other is in the room, Mr Abe, whose “Abenomics” has pushed a rapid recovery in the world’s third-largest economy, but with continued long-term fears for its sustainability. Mr Abe will come to Lough Erne with a simple argument. The 15 years of deflation Japan has experienced, more or less without interruption, were extraordinary, so they demanded an extraordinary policy response. G8 summit Read our coverage of the gathering as leaders debate tax, trade, the global economy and foreign policy So far, trading partners have fixated on the yen, still the world’s worst-performing currency over the past six months even after its rapid rise over the past week. But a lower yen is a side-effect of a concerted effort to rouse the world’s third-largest economy from slumber, the prime minister will say. What is good for Japan is good, for everybody else. Unofficially, the Japanese argument is even simpler, however. The yen acted as the world’s shock absorber for the four years after the Lehman crisis, Japan thinks. Even now, amid a fresh round of fears over global growth, it is still about 5 per cent stronger than its 10-year average against the US dollar. So, leaving aside all the talk of trade wars and stealing growth from neighbours, isn’t it time Japan caught a break? Germany and the US are wary about this conclusion and will be relieved by the yen’s recent bounce back as they tolerated but did not welcome the yen’s depreciation since the start of Abenomics. But the key question for Japan is whether the boost to growth is anything more than temporary. Here, Mr Abe will try to spell out the guiding principles behind the “third arrow” of structural reforms, that was approved by the cabinet on Friday. Arrows one and two – fiscal and monetary stimulus – were easy to implement and quick to take effect. The third will not be. Continue reading
Life’s Too Short To Bother With IHT Avoidance
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/63b73472-d36d-11e2-b3ff-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2X2FlNRb4 By Jonathan Eley Ways of avoiding it are generally not worth it How’s this for a business proposition? You invest a minimum of £25,000 into a new and unquoted company that promises to develop renewable energy projects. It is targeting an annual return of 6 per cent return, but will incur costs of up to 2.5 per cent. There’s also a 2.5 per cent initial charge, and the investment will only be accessible through a professional adviser, who doubtless will not be working for free either. Framed in those terms, it doesn’t sound particularly compelling, does it? The likely net return of 3.5 per cent is broadly comparable to the yield on the FTSE 100. Why put a fixed sum into an unquoted start-up venture with fairly stiff charges when you could put money into a tracker fund with rock-bottom costs, get the same net return just from the dividends paid by Britain’s largest and most financially secure companies, hopefully enjoy some price appreciation, and be able to sell any time you want? The answer is that money in the tracker fund would not be shielded from inheritance tax, which is the primary purpose of Albion Community Power, the product described above. Backed by Albion Ventures, once part of Close Brothers, it launches this week and aims to raise £25m from individual investors. It will be chaired by the Conservative MP Tim Yeo, a former energy minister who this week stepped aside as chairman of the Commons energy committee while allegations of influence-peddling are investigated. Albion says it has done lots of research that shows how worried people are about inheritance tax – of the 2,000 individuals it polled, 61 per cent had already taken advice about how to mitigate IHT, or planned to do so. Based on its figures, it estimates that over a million households expect to leave an average inheritance of more than £613,000. It proposes a “solution” to inheritance tax by utilising business property relief, which exempts qualifying investments from inheritance tax once they have been owned for two years or more. This is the same relief utilised by various other IHT avoidance ruses, such as shares quoted on the Alternative Investment Market, Enterprise Investment Schemes, farmland, forestry and so on. However, there’s a big snag with business property relief. It’s designed to facilitate the transfer of real businesses from one generation to another without incurring huge tax bills, or the funding of new growth companies. It’s not really intended to allow the rest of us to avoid paying tax on the accidental accumulation of housing wealth, which is what many are now effectively using it for. Many of the ventures that qualify for BPR will by definition be small and risky with a higher than average chance of failure. Their shares may not be easy to trade – or may not be traded at all – so you or your heirs might not be able to sell when you want or the price you want. In short, they are probably the sort of investment that you should be avoiding towards the end of your life. ACP has lessened the risks somewhat by focusing on renewable energy, which is backed by a myriad of government subsidies and reliefs, many of which are inflation-linked, and where it has past form – Albion Ventures says its existing renewables projects are generating returns of 11 per cent. Still, there are many other ways to avoid inheritance tax, most of which don’t involve risky investments and don’t cost much. You could set up a trust and place assets within it. This allows you to retain some control over how those assets are used while they are in the trust, because settlors are allowed to be trustees (just not beneficiaries). The assets lie outside your estate, although they are not completely exempt from tax charges. You can also make gifts out of surplus income, provided you can prove that the gifts are regular and that your everyday standard of living is not affected. Better still, you can give money away while you’re still alive. That way, you get to influence how it’s spent, enjoy the gratitude of the recipients, and get a warm glow from knowing that you are boosting the economy and facilitating the transfer of wealth and property to younger generations at a time when they most need it. There are two main snags with these approaches, though. One is that you cannot change your mind. You cannot withdraw money from a trust, nor can you ask your nephew to sell that snazzy sports car he bought with your surplus income in order to pay for your long-term care. The other is the “seven-year rule” – for larger gifts to lie completely outside your estate, you generally have to soldier on for another seven years. So whichever way you do it, avoiding IHT involves a lot of risks, uncertainties and trade-offs. That’s no coincidence. You’re not meant to avoid it. The Treasury collected £2.9bn from IHT in the 2011/12 tax year, and expects that figure to rise to £4.1bn in 2017/18 (see chart). No wonder the Conservatives, who in opposition advocated a nil-rate band of £1m, have now frozen the allowance at £325,000 until 2018, thus ensuring that more people will end up paying it. Is avoiding IHT really worth the bother? I’d say not. IHT is primarily a tax on wealth accumulated by accident, usually via an asset which is, stamp duty aside, largely untaxed elsewhere in the system. There is already a large nil-rate band and transfers between spouses are exempt. If you’re that worried about IHT, don’t wait to become a millionaire corpse: downsize and donate while you’re still alive. After all, you can’t take it with you. jonathan.eley@ft.com Continue reading
