'We lost everything gambling on shares'

grey_gym_sock

amazon pay VAT? i know they don't only sell books, but books are zero-rated.

the corporation tax fiddle, used by amazon among others, actually has not much to do with the EU. it can be fixed by reforming the international tax systems - this would work best if most governments (not just the EU) got to together to do it.

kidmugsy

atush wrote: »

Remind me, on sales of over a billion how much tax did Amazon pay HMRC last year?

Since it's profits that are taxed, not sales, the question is rather daft.

le_loup

Quite right. And they don't make any profit.
Your next point is?

grizzly1911

atush wrote: »

So, you are saying they pay TAX by handing over VAT, that they charge their customers on HMRC's behalf? that isn't them paying tax, it is their customer's paying tax. None of it comes from amazon's tightly locked coffer's

Isn't that one of the drivers for using VAT taxing consumption so that income can't be massaged to avoid taxation? The consumer pays the same irrespective of how it is collected.

It also ensures those in the black market also pay tax.

Not justifying any aggressive tax avoidance measures BTW taxes should be paid in the jurisdiction the income is made for business.

kwmlondon

kidmugsy wrote: »

You can't go wrong in bricks and mortar.

Tell that to the person who bought my flat in August. The next door neighbor is trying to sell and their buyer's surveyor noticed Japanese knotweed in the garden. They'll take months to get the management company to take action and then it could take years to clear up. Okay if you can afford to wait 3-5 years to sell up, but that's not an option for many so you'll have to sell to a cash buyer for a fraction of the value of the house as nobody can get a mortgage on it.

MABLE

Wow £180K a lot to lose. I felt bad enough losing £180 last year on shares last year. I am now happy to keep any extra money i have to overpay on our mortgage and because of this we will be MF January 2015.

atush

Did you feel bad losing spending power on any cash held last year?

N1AK

mark88man wrote: »

Or perhaps they were normal, possibly high functioning, people who were led into the war zone and abandoned by Barclays

They weren't led into a war zone any-more than I am when I'm walking alongside a road 'resisting the governments attempts to make me spontaneously jump into it'.

The tool might be relatively advanced, debatable, but it would have been very evident that they were losing a lot of money well before they lost anything like the amount they did. It happened over years, and if the same behaviour could be followed with completely standard share buying over that time period.

So what do we do? Refuse to sell shares to people below a certain IQ, or perhaps require that anyone buying shares shows they have more than £200k in assets left after buying them? Short of having someone watch their every move and intervene when they decide the behaviour is sufficiently moronic the only other option is to completely remove access to anything other than standard savings style accounts which are part of FSCS including by speculating on commodities, assets and property just in case.

Blackbeard_of_Perranporth

First line of the report. We Borrowed Money. To buy shares!

And if the price has rocketed, would they be ....

MABLE

atush wrote: »

Did you feel bad losing spending power on any cash held last year?

Gutted is a word that springs to mind.