tanked

With oil prices sinking to near historic lows, it’s really remarkable how causality comes unhinged when reason dictates that a lot of the economy hangs on the price of fuel. Though household budgets are seeing some degree of respite at the petrol station, the positive repercussions seem to end there and the myopic outlook is compounded.
Some hold the whole situation has a conspiratorial character meant to knock Russia down a notch as retribution for Ukraine, and event if this plot were true, the effects could not be contained and would lead to even graver instability in other oil-exporting nations. Without pain at the pump, environmental conscious bows out and the motivation for cleaner technologies falls away—with only greenwashing on offer. Waning demand has ensured the continued depression of prices, and the profit gradient for country’s whose wealth is an especially narrow one.  In hock as much as they were just recently flush with cash because of their commodity, Russia, Nigeria, Argentina and the Middle East are faced with the reckoning of re-financing and lenders are closing their ranks for other clients and keeping prices to the consumer steady. It is sort of like personable occupants stuck in a broken elevator turning to cannibalism.The formerly safe-bets of petroleum and follow-on industries are becoming unpalatable, and investors scuttle to park their money elsewhere—in rather hollow and abstract instruments that court yet another bubble coaxed to bursting.

grace and favour or sweetheart deal

Not just in the UK (whose crown dependencies prove haven and safe-harbour for this sort of arrangements) but for the tax-paying public all over the world the apparent pittance in levies that large corporations have paid in compared to revenue is inciting outrage. Because of the byzantine complexity of the situation and the fine distinction between avoidance and evasion, it is hard to say what exactly has transpired although there’s more than a hint of civic injustice and it seems as if corporate taxes are somewhat of a voluntary contribution—and not even the suggested donation when the collection-plate is passed down.
Of course, other methods of circumvention could be cooked up and it is not so straightforward to say where a product or service fulfilled its raison d’être of generating a profit—and what the public at large are privy to is necessarily mediated—but perhaps the whole corporate tax scheme as it exists, essentially hard to enforce and interrupt and by design encourages evasive manœuvres, and like proposals for a flat-tax or a Value-Added Tax (VAT) charged on the wealthy that excises a fixed percentage and eliminates loop-holes so far as deductions go, perhaps the same system would work for big businesses. The problem remains, I think, of sourcing earnings and different tax jurisdictions would walk on each others throats to claim a piece of it, but perhaps as lowering the burden is good for share-holders, a simpler and manifest tax regime might prove better for all stake-holders, corporate giants investing more in their own ecosystems (employees, research and host communities) in order to divest themselves of some fiduciary obligations.

horse's mouth or cruz-control

Why me? I’m a presidential contender and not at all three of the Campbell’s Soup kids balanced on top of each other imperson- ating an adult in order to place a bet on a race-horse, for whom I have insider-knowledge.

6x6

childlike princess: an attraction in a Munich studio holds the props from The Neverending Story

bruder spaghettus: a small town north of Berlin is the nexus of Germany’s Pastafarian faith

claim-jumpers: interesting history of the “ashcan copy,” a slap-dash way of calling dibs on a movie franchise

falconeer: to stop potential drone attacks, Denmark is training up its eagles

power hungry: interesting juxtapositions of meal-time discrepancies of the rich and poor throughout the ages

diorama: daily miniature photography project with an inexhaustible eye for tiny landscapes