For our readers’ information, we provide a summary of the G20 communique. We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, met in London on 2 April 2009.

The LibDems are nothing if not persistent in their push to replace “the unfair” Council Tax by local income tax (LIT). Despite the collapse of the Scottish proposals in February, LIT is still a LibDem policy and was not dropped at the party’s Spring Conference. They would do well to examine the Scottish experience, which was summarised in an article in The Scotsman.

The Turner Review – a regulatory response to the banking crisis – has just been published. It is a highly technical and densely written 120 page analysis which needs to be gone through carefully. Anyone lacking the necessary background knowledge will be unable to grasp much of the detail. All we can say about it is to point out yet again that the primary cause was a credit-fuelled land...

Private equity company Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman said on Tuesday that up to 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed by the global credit crisis. “Between 40 and 45 percent of the world’s wealth has been destroyed in little less than a year and a half,” Schwarzman told an audience at the Japan Society. “This is absolutely unprecedented in...

Former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has defended his policies against an increasing number of critics who argue they are largely responsible for the current financial and economic crisis. Greenspan, who chaired the US central bank between 1987 and the beginning of 2006, said in today’s Wall Street Journal that keeping the so-called federal-funds rate – or overnight lending...

FT journalist Martin Wolfe takes the same view as us of the government’s bank insurance scheme. He writes… “The UK government looks increasingly like a python that has swallowed a hippopotamus. In acting as insurer of last resort to the British-based banking system, it is taking on huge risks on behalf of taxpayers. If this turned out to be a global depression, with huge losses...

As the Royal Bank of Scotland unloads £325bn of dodgy assets on the Treasury, Sunday Daily Telegraph financial journalist Philip Aldrick examines the potentially calamitous asset protection scheme here. We hope events will prove us wrong, but we share the doomsters’ worst predictions.

A bookmaker would not accept a bet that the Houses of Parliament lie to the west of the Greenwich meridian, because it is a fact that they do, with no element of a chance that they do not. By the same token, insurance companies do not issue policies involving paying out against what is inevitable, but only against the prospect of a risk that some specified event might occur. Thus it is undisputed...

The national debt is likely to be exceed £2 trillion following the Treasury’s decision to stand behind Britain’s troubled banks’ debts. The latest Government figures emphasise fears about the impact of the crisis on the taxpayer and may spark further anxieties over Britain’s creditworthiness.

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee has voted unanimously to seek Government permission to increase the amount of money in the economy as interest rate cuts lose their power to fight recession.