An unfortunate piece of timing. There’s probably never such a thing as a good time for a government to talk about taxation. For the public the only good change is a reduction. Talk of tax increases and new taxes, even taxes they personally won’t have to pay, worry people. The planned taxes Australia is soon to have on mining company profits and on carbon emitting companies are proof of that.

The tax talk is surely one of the reasons for the hesitant consumer spending and the dismal rating of the government as measured by opinion polls. Which makes this a particularly inappropriate time to be holding a summit of the high and mighty to consider further changes to the way that governments raise the necessary dollars from us. Consumer confidence is bound to be dented further at a time when there are frightening signs that, outside of the mining industry and the construction industry that is supporting its growth, this is at best a stagnating economy.

Take a look again at that most significant of indicators for a government — the unemployment rate:

We are down from the peak levels approaching 6% recorded during the global financial crisis but have levelled out around 5% — well above the 4% rate of 2008. The way things are going in the retailing. manufacturing and housing industries the next movement is as likely to be up as down.

It is not a good time to be worrying the people.

Remembering Japan. I’m not a stock exchange kind of fellow so I am happy to bow to the wisdom of others on the subject. But I must say the words of Marcus Padley in his Morning Market Report for Crikey set me thinking:

“One of the lessons from the GFC was that although a lot of people quote the rather arrogant Buffettesque principle that you should invest on the basis that you could close the market for 10 years (arrogant because only the very wealthy could possibly be that patient), the truth is that you can’t close the market for 10 years. The consequence of ignoring the market for 18 months in the GFC was that you lost 13 years’ worth of average returns. In the real world you have to do better than that. No-one can afford to lose 13 years of financial returns in any retirement time frame.”

Thinking about Japan in fact. And to the references I keep reading about other western nations perhaps ending up in the same state as what was once described as the world’s miracle economy.

And while on that stock exchange subject … This interesting little table from that excellent blog Calculated Risk puts last night’s fall in American share prices into perspective. It comes in as number 27 on the post-1950 top 40 falls.

Now we know it’s serious. We all know about bank fees and charges but Bank of New York Mellon yesterday started charging some of its clients for depositing money into their account. If the bank’s big corporate and asset management clients put in more money than normal they now have to pay a fee — a negative interest rate you could call it.

Reuters explains that the flood of cash is likely to raise BNY Mellon’s US deposit insurance fees and could weaken capital ratios, which are partly based on liabilities such as deposits:

“The decision to impose a charge, however, reflects how pressed banks feel to control costs as interest rates wallow near zero in an economy that shows little signs of recovery.

“The decision to charge for deposits contributed to soaring demand on Thursday for U.S. Treasury bills, traders said, as bank depositors redeployed cash into government securities. One-month T-bill rates dipped below zero.”