It remains the case that the 4 most competitive financial centres in Europe aren't in the EU (Global Financial Centres Index). That's likely to continue once London and Zurich form closer ties.
Your link contradicts you. Says such a deal with Swiss will do little to reverse the exodus to Paris and Amsterdam, some 96% moved straight to EU on day of Brexit, and regulations will probably make it prohibitive to manage financial assets outside the bloc.
"The U.K. allowing Swiss shares to trade will do little to overcome the exodus of EU shares after Brexit. The three biggest venues in London that handle European shares saw almost all of this business shift into the EU on the first day of trading after the U.K. completed its exit from the bloc on Dec. 31."
Yeah, it doesn't seem like very good argumentation to cite a source while taking the exact opposite viewpoint from the one substantiated in said source.
> Yeah, it doesn't seem like very good argumentation to cite a source while taking the exact opposite viewpoint from the one substantiated in said source.
I can’t tell if this is sarcasm. I’ve accidentally done what OP has done. I‘d read an article with a useful and clear argument, and then later when I came across a relevant discussion, I‘d try to find that article. Yet in the search process I unfortunately end up not finding the original, and in my haste end up linking to the wrong article with the wrong argument(s).
I think you're disagreeing with the OP because you're using different definitions of "Europe".
One of the more insidious psychological techniques the EU and its adherents like to use is using the word Europe when they mean the EU. The EU is a political institution. Europe is a continent. Switzerland and the UK are in Europe but not in the EU. EU officials and the media of member states constantly conflate the two, and it leads to confusion like we see in this thread, where people literally can't communicate with each other.
The largest financial centres in Europe the continent will likely remain London and Switzerland. NB: "financial centres" do far more than trade Eurozone stocks. Financial services is a very large market that encompasses many different things, like insurance, pensions, private wealth management and software development.
The largest stock trading centres for shares in companies traded in the Eurozone will move to within EU member states and stay there, largely because EU the institution is a protectionist bloc that spends great energy finding ways to create trading barriers that sneak past the WTO's definitions. The Commission's notion of "equivalence" is one of those: the plain English reading is that two jurisdictions have equivalent financial regulation if they're the same. The Commission's definition is that equivalence is an arbitrary label they can add and remove as they see fit as part of unrelated political games (the EU/Swiss "row" mentioned in the article is one of those). No actual changes in financial regulation are needed to gain or lose financial "equivalence".
> It remains the case that the 4 most competitive financial centres in Europe aren't in the EU (Global Financial Centres Index). That's likely to continue once London and Zurich form closer ties.
It's not invalidating your point but assuming Wikipedia accurately reflects the index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index) the four most competitive financial centers in Europe are London, Zurich, Luxemburg, and Edinburgh.
>Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman said London had already supplied the necessary paperwork and was “one of the world’s most pre-eminent financial centres, with a strong regulatory system”, adding that fragmenting markets was in no one’s interests.
Was there some part of Vote Leave that didn't have to do with fragmenting markets and evading a strong regulatory system?
The leave campaign was about 'control' and getting foreigners out. I guess there was little actual thinking on what that means for an economy based mainly on services and in particular financial services. The UK lost any chance to get a good trade deal when the prime minister said he'd make the country a tax haven if the EU doesn't sign a deal and introduced legislation breaking the agreement before the agreement was even in force.
Then complain and blame the EU for everything afterwards as Britain has always done. ~40 years in the block spent blocking any social legislation or further integration...
Honestly that it why most marriages fail. Fundamentally different expectations and ignoring them and hoping they'll come around. Better off seperate; I'm excited to see the future of the EU without those who don't want to be there.
No. The Leave campaign was not about synchronisation of minor trading regulations when there's no real disagreement over policy. Plenty of Leave supporters and campaigners actually support that strongly, hence the divisions within that camp over whether to try and become a part of the EEA.
The UK's position is that lack of trade barriers does not require an ideological project to convert all of Europe into a single country under the rule of a non-democratic, unelected and all powerful executive branch, which is openly and proudly the goal of the EU project. That's why the same government that's (now) committed to Brexit is quite happy to consider joining Asian free trade zones.
As for a "strong" regulatory system, the whole world just got to see in crystal clear detail what that looks like in the medical area. Pointless delays, failed obfuscation of contracts, lying about the contents of those same contracts, imposing hard borders on Northern Ireland without even bothering to tell the countries in question and then immediately backpedalling. There's no strength in this system, just incompetence, chaos and greed.
> non-democratic, unelected and all powerful executive branch
This is just not true. The EU is run by the Council of Ministers primarily (who are the national ministers of the member states), with a side-order of democracy from the European parliament.
If you're going to argue about something, please choose an accurate thing to argue about.
> imposing hard borders on Northern Ireland without even bothering to tell the countries in question and then immediately backpedalling
Again, this isn't what happened. One interpretation of a proposed order would have necessitated some kind of border. The Republic of Ireland vociferously objected, and the proposal was withdrawn.
That being said, I think the EU could be a lot better, and am deeply sorry that the UK left (especially vis-a-vis the consequences for Northern Ireland).
The Council of Ministers does not run the EU. The EU is run by the Commission. Where does EU law come from - it comes from the Commission. Not the Council nor the Parliament (which means, it's not a Parliament).
If the Council ran the EU then EU law would come from there, but it never does. The power to make law is the ultimate power, the source of all government power. The Council is in contrast a sideshow. Nobody even knows what they talk about.
And the Commission is entirely undemocratic. How was von der Leyen selected again? Nobody can say. Oh, there was a vote. It was a vote in the EU Parliament in which vDL was the only candidate on the ballot sheet. That's not a democracy, is it?
Again, this isn't what happened. One interpretation of a proposed order would have necessitated some kind of border. The Republic of Ireland vociferously objected, and the proposal was withdrawn.
Are you aware that the Commission was condemned by everyone across the board including its own diplomats? The order wasn't proposed, it was made and the only possible interpretation was for a hard border, hence the immediate and strong objections. That, after 4 years of the EU constantly claiming a border in NI would create terrorism and must never happen at any cost.
> The EU is run by the Commission. Where does EU law come from - it comes from the Commission.
The Commission propose the laws. I agree that this is problematic, but since Lisbon, it's been a lot better in terms of directly elected representatives making decisions.
Regardless, nothing the Commission propose becomes European laws/directive without the assent of both the Council and the Parliament.
It's rather democratic, as a matter of fact, especially given the use of proportional representation for EP members in many of the member states.
> If the Council ran the EU then EU law would come from there, but it never does. The power to make law is the ultimate power, the source of all government power. The Council is in contrast a sideshow. Nobody even knows what they talk about.
I personally follow the council discussions, as they are where things actually get decided. I'm not unique.
> And the Commission is entirely undemocratic. How was von der Leyen selected again? Nobody can say. Oh, there was a vote. It was a vote in the EU Parliament in which vDL was the only candidate on the ballot sheet. That's not a democracy, is it?
Von der Leyen was selected by the Council of Ministers. They refused to go along with the proposal from the groups in the EP that whatever candidate they proposed should become the Commission President. Again, not a fan of that decision on democratic grounds, but it's what happened, and it rather puts the lie to your comment that the Council is powerless and nobody even knows what they talk about.
Literally all of the consequential decisions made by the EU have been decided by the Council of Ministers. Those overnight summits that are particularly characteristic of the EU, are summits of the Council of Ministers.
> Are you aware that the Commission was condemned by everyone across the board including its own diplomats? The order wasn't proposed, it was made and the only possible interpretation was for a hard border, hence the immediate and strong objections. That, after 4 years of the EU constantly claiming a border in NI would create terrorism and must never happen at any cost.
Yes, because I live in the Republic of Ireland. It was super bad what happened there, and the proposal literally lasted 8 hours before being buried.
And with respect to terrorism, there's no easy way out of that I'm afraid. The irish government lobbied for the EU to take NI into account in the negotiations, and that happened.
Unfortunately, with the situation in Northern Ireland, any border anywhere was going to create tension (and the potential for smuggling/terrorism). I'm unhappy about the sea border as it's a provocation to Unionists, but it is maybe 100 times better than a land border.
Please show me the meeting notes where vDL was decided to be the new Commission head. As far as I'm aware they aren't public, but I'd be very interested to read them as would many other people.
The Commission has the exclusive power to propose changes to the law. That makes the non-Parliament worthless. There is no point in the so-called parties that populate this so-called Parliament having any policies because they can't do anything. In turn that makes so-called political campaigning also useless because there's nothing to campaign about. They can only rubber stamp the Commission's prior decisions. It's a fake Parliament which is why such a ridiculous proportion of MEPs are actually against the EU as an institution, something you don't find anywhere else.
Literally all of the consequential decisions made by the EU have been decided by the Council of Ministers
Where were they on vaccines then? The Council "decided" to give all the responsibility for that to the Commission. That's the general flavour of their decisions: give the Commission more power.
> Please show me the meeting notes where vDL was decided to be the new Commission head. As far as I'm aware they aren't public, but I'd be very interested to read them as would many other people.
> The Commission has the exclusive power to propose changes to the law.
Yes, but those laws have no effect until both the Council and the Parliament accept them.
In many ways, it's similar to the fact that most governments (i.e. the executive) have practically exclusive powers to propose laws (as they'll have a majority by definition). I agree that it's not ideal, but things are trending in the right direction.
> That makes the non-Parliament worthless. There is no point in the so-called parties that populate this so-called Parliament having any policies because they can't do anything. In turn that makes so-called political campaigning also useless because there's nothing to campaign about. They can only rubber stamp the Commission's prior decisions. It's a fake Parliament which is why such a ridiculous proportion of MEPs are actually against the EU as an institution, something you don't find anywhere else.
So, from Wikipedia, it appears that approximately 130 of the 700 representatives are considered to be Eurosceptic. So that's about 18%. I think that's a fair reflection of the level of EU-scepticism across the continent.
> which is why such a ridiculous proportion of MEPs are actually against the EU as an institution, something you don't find anywhere else.
I'm going to make the assumption that you are British (apologies if this is not true). In the current UK parliament you have 47 SNP MP's, and 6 SF MP's. Neither of these accept the validity of the UK parliament, making that approximately 8% relative to the EP. This is lower, but definitely it's possible to have people like that (another good example would be the pro-separist parties in Catalonia).
> Where were they on vaccines then? The Council "decided" to give all the responsibility for that to the Commission. That's the general flavour of their decisions: give the Commission more power.
Speaking as a member of a small EU state, I'm glad the EU took on procurement as we would be in a much worse state otherwise. That being said, the Commission fucked up here, I don't think anyone denies it, but hopefully they will learn from this mistake.
This kind of news really isn't that surprising. What's concerning (if you're from the UK) is that unfortunately the current government don't seem keen to admit the reality of the impact to trade that brexit will have.
Without that admission, it's hard for them to come up with strategies to mitigate it.
You see this lack of acknowledgement of the inevitable here and also on the situation with Northern Ireland and the impact on export businesses in the UK
The current government made the mess. Politically, it's hard for them to admit that it is a mess. "Everything is proceeding well and according to plan, citizen. There is no need for you to be concerned..."
Brexit, by its very nature was always going to be damaging to the UK both financially and otherwise.
But it really did not need to be this bad.
The UK government’s lack of acknowledgment of reality and absolutely no efforts to prepare for the impacts of Brexit or focus on the industries that actually matter as opposed to those that are just symbolic has made a much bigger mess than it ever needed to be.
It's the modern equivalent to the 70s/80s de-industrialization under Thatcher: maybe it had to be done, but the tories are needlessly bent on doing it in the harshest possible way - for reasons exclusively related to internal power struggles in their party.
A generation will suffer for it, and the next one will again swear they'll never vote Conservative... until they make a bit of money, and then it's back to blue.
What struck me as crazy was the focus on fishing rights. More than there are boats to actually do the fishing with, while there are so many more economically impact full topics left without a solution.
It’s like coal mining in Kentucky and Pennsylvania; they’re more important to the region’s self image than they are to the region’s current economic reality. This sometimes creates silly circumstances where policy is aimed at a sector that’s fundamentally not that big, and hurts more people than it helps.
I cannot stress this enough. It hurts both Europe and the UK equally. People act like whatever it is that's done the City of London is something any idiot could do given the chance. Maybe that's the case but I doubt it. Whatever's being done there is something that everyone in Europe is now missing out on.
That's a complicated view though. It's much easier to say that those idiots have been replaced but some other set and everyone in London is now on the dole.
IMHO one of the main reasons London was so popular with the rest of the Europeans, was the language. So I am not surprised to see Amsterdam picking up, as you can get away pretty well with just English in Netherlands.
Same applies to Scandinavia yet Copenhagen or Stockholm are not Amsterdam.
The reason Amsterdam took the spot was it has been historically very "tax friendly" to corporations, shall we say, to the point where most foreign conglomerates and even the French Airbus and the Swedish IKEA have set up their holding companies there.
Dutch people don't want to hear this but the Netherlands are a tax haven just like Ireland. Luxembourg and Switzerland aren't actually that attractive for tax avoidance anymore.
Why don't they want to hear this? It's not really a secret, I'm pretty sure they know it.
I'm not Dutch, but a near zero-tax policy (for the big players), with a stable low-corruption government, easy bureaucracy, EU and NATO member, a huge harbor, top infrastructure plus a highly skilled workforce and easy immigration policy is bound to attract every company out there.
A bunch of the top market maker HFT outfits moved to Amsterdam a couple of years ago due to Brexit. I have contacts at two of them. It’s much cheaper than London, plenty of smart graduates who speak excellent English and are very Anglo/US friendly, solid financial regulatory structure and all the advantages you listed. Plus it’s only an hour to City Airport in London, which means you arrive about the same time you left if popping into the Square Mile in the morning for a meeting. The loss of an hour on the return journey at the end of the day isn’t as important. It’s also close to the middle between London, Frankfurt and Berlin. Great bars and restaurants too.
The flight itself should take about an hour, but with the trip to and from the airports, the luggage and passport controls and the need to arrive before the plane takes off, I would say the travel time between two offices in Amsterdam and London will be at least two hours if not three.
Plenty of people in London have pushing two hour commutes anyway, and City Airport is so quick they don't bother with priority queues. I've stepped out of a Taxi at City and been sitting down in the plane in under 15 minutes, although I wouldn't count on it. If you miss one and have to wait for the next plane the bar does pretty good Eggs Benedict.
That's not my life anymore and I don't actually know the Schiphol end myself, but that's what it's like.
I remember back in 2016 when I woke up after a party, at 2 PM, and my flight was at 3:00. It was going to be my first time flying out of the City, so I immediately assumed I wouldn't even be able to check in my luggage on time. Then I remembered it was a last-minute business airport after all, so checked the check-in cut-off times on BA website and couldn't believe my eyes: 20 minutes before the flight. Managed to pack, get a cab from Dalston, get to the airport, check-in and still had time for a quick "breakfast". The smoothest experience ever, barring the hangover. And the views are astonishing!
I've lived/worked between Amsterdam and London for years.
Eurostar is my clear preference if you can get a straight through train without changing in Brussels. Departs St Pancras at 5:11pm. Travel Standard Premier so you get dinner at your seat at 5:15pm. 4h trip, no changes. Arrive at Ams Central Station at 10:20pm. Arrive at home/hotel by 10:40pm. Slower, but extremely comfortable. And you can work productively all the way.
For travelling in the morning, the 7:25am flight from LCY is good. The smaller airport is much quicker to get through than LHR or LGW.
For the return trip from Amsterdam to London, you do lose a lot of time at Schiphol airport. Flying into LCY makes up for it though, especially if you work in Canary Wharf. I'd typically take 20 mins from plane landing to sitting at my desk.
Can confirm. I used to fly from City to Schiphol on a regular basis, the reality is a 2-3 hour journey on each end once you factor in travel to the airport (even from Docklands), hanging about, security (and this was before 9/11), late flights, and then just getting out of Schiphol into a taxi to start your journey to the financial centre. Amsterdam being "just an hour away" is a complete myth, much like any other flying for business in Europe.
Dutch economists in EU institutions typically ask for higher taxes and austerity for the rest of the eu nations while trying to not talk about the zero-tax policy they themselves apply to corporation + laws that help in tax avoidance for corps with legal hq there.
> the zero-tax policy they themselves apply to corporation + laws that help in tax avoidance for corps with legal hq there.
There's no such zero-tax policy. There simply is the liquidatieverliesregeling, which allows you to subtract not-yet-subtracted losses from investments overseas from the profits in the HQ.
Shell is the common example. It has an HQ in the Netherlands, and many overseas investments. e.g. hundreds of places where it drills for oil in many different jurisdictions.
Suppose 9 of these of these do not find profitable oil and thus make a loss of $10 each, and 1 of these does find oil and makes a profit of $100. The total profit for Shell is $100-90 = $10. Corporate taxes only tax profits, that's true around the world.
However, because the 10 Shell entities are drilling for oil in 10 different jurisdictions, the one profitable company cannot deduct losses from other jurisdictions from its profits. Therefore the $100 is taxed at say 20%, so the income is $80. And the losses are still $90. So overal, worldwide Shell just made a $10 loss due to taxes, despite making a profit.
The Netherlands' tax regime simply states that if you have an HQ, you can deduct all those losses which you haven't been able to deduct before, from the profits of the HQ. That's in principle a fair form of taxation. Second, it doesn't benefit the Netherlands tax-wise, because it reduces the tax income in the Netherlands, while profits overseas are still taxed overseas and generate income for those local jurisdictions.
This idea that therefore the Netherlands has a zero-tax policy that's screwing other countries is nonsense. There are many other examples and discussions you can have about Dutch taxes creating issues overseas (the Netherlands is certainly not perfect), but the tax regime for corps with a legal HQ in the Netherlands isn't one of them.
> This idea that therefore the Netherlands has a zero-tax policy that's screwing other countries is nonsense. There are many other examples and discussions you can have about Dutch taxes creating issues overseas (the Netherlands is certainly not perfect), but the tax regime for corps with a legal HQ in the Netherlands isn't one of them.
Of Nike: “ The sports apparel maker used a common, legal method of shifting profits to a tax haven, according to the consortium’s research. First, it allocated ownership of its “swoosh” trademark and other intellectual property to a subsidiary in Bermuda, which has no corporate income tax. Then, its subsidiary in Hilversum paid royalties for the use of the trademarks to the Bermuda unit. The royalties counted as business expenses and in that way avoided taxation in the Netherlands.”
And more generally: “ The Netherlands long justified its laws by arguing that they encouraged multinational companies to establish their headquarters in the country, creating jobs and investment.
More recently, however, legal thinking and public opinion have turned.
Officials in Brussels have accused the Netherlands of violating the European Union’s rules by helping Ikea to shear its tax bill. And polls show that Dutch voters have become increasingly angry at what they see as special privileges for wealthy corporations paying little or nothing — middle-class residents of the Netherlands, by contrast, can easily pay more than half their income in taxes.”
IP cross-licensing/royalties is the biggest loophole when it comes to transfer pricing.
The reason is pretty clear. There's usually no independent measure of value (because it's not like Apple/Nike/etc are licensing their brand to third parties) so it's very difficult for a tax authority to dispute the company's valuation concocted out of thin air.
On the other hand, IP does cost money to develop, and it's often developed in one country but used in another. Presumably you wouldn't want to just remove IP tax-deductibility outright.
It's such an absurdly exploitable loophole, though, that I'm beginning to take the view that intra-group licensing arrangements should basically be ignored for tax deductibility purposes. Under my revised framework, companies can still deduct consolidated IP costs, but only at the HQ level (i.e. not in between subsidiary groups).
The end result would be Google Australia paying slightly more tax in Australia, but Google USA pays slightly less tax in the USA.
I really don't see that as a problem, given how rapacious these companies have been at exploiting the existing arrangements.
Interested to know if others have thoughts on this arrangement.
Not sure why you posted this, it has nothing to do with the favourable tax-regime for placing your HQ in the Netherlands which I specifically spoke about (liquidatieverliesregeling).
The royalties you mention have nothing to do with whether you have your HQ in the Netherlands. Second, it's the American company (Nike) that ultimately profits, due to a Bermuda company which actually has a zero corporate tax rate policy, not the Netherlands. The US can change its laws to tax the IP created there. All that happens for the Netherlands is that it's missing out on tax income that'd otherwise be generated locally here. We shouldn't pretend as if there's this one country that unilaterally decides and profits. Instead, these structures are based on mutual tax treaties, and in this case the US agreed, the US company Nike profits, and the Netherlands is missing out on tax revenue.
Second, that situation has already been rectified due to the new tax on royalties in the Netherlands.
I haven't seen any change in public opinion, it's always stated that large companies pay too little, small companies and employees pay too much. And that's pretty much true in all countries.
It's certainly not perfect here but I find the discussions are often misguided and lacking nuance. I also find that many journalists just don't get it right.
>Why don't they want to hear this? It's not really a secret, I'm pretty sure they know it.
This is like the EU version of a Californian saying those dastardly Texans should be ashamed of their low taxes when BigCo announces they're moving to Texas.
It's a backhanded way of implying that it's not a good thing or that they should be ashamed or whatever.
Because it implies that their wealth is not due to hard work or excellent education, but mostly because they undercut the rest of the EU on companies taxation.
What zero-tax policy? The Netherlands has no such policy. There are of course a complex system of incentives and exemptions (e.g. for R&D) just like in any other country, but there's no general zero-tax policy or anything near it.
The Netherlands' tax system isn't perfect and there are certainly abuses, by the way. But I do want to add some nuance here.
I won't go into non-corporate taxes because I assume that's not what is being talked about here, but the Netherlands also ranks among the highest in the world in total taxes as a percentage of GDP.
The Netherlands is quite aware that we are considered a tax haven, it's in the news all the time. What most other countries don't like to hear is that multinationals consider them a tax have not for the low corporate tax rate (it's not the lowest in the EU), but because the tax authority provides a much better service.
In particular, companies can get so called "tax rulings" that allow them to predict exactly how much their tax bill will be, as long as their revenue, depreciations, etc, stay within an agreed upon range.
In many other countries it can take over a year to get a final total on your tax return. This causes headaches for multinationals who need to keep a reserve somewhere to account for the worst possible outcome of that tax bill. I would say that attracting multinationals with better service is fair game.
>> Dutch people don't want to hear this but the Netherlands are a tax haven just like Ireland. Luxembourg and Switzerland aren't actually that attractive for tax avoidance anymore.
> Why they don't want to hear this ? Isn't it something the Dutch people should be very proud of ?
Why would anyone be proud of living in a tax haven? The whole point of being one is to profit a little off of a race to the bottom by undermining your neighbor's tax system by helping their wealthy be greedier.
I fail to understand what is wrong with this. What is wrong in people keeping more of their wealth to themselves ? Heck I am not even very rich but would love to live in a country that does not tax and on top will be extremely proud to be the citizen.
If there is something wrong in lower taxes are you implying thay countries with 100% taxes (where you turn up everything you have to your government) would be somehow morally superior or something to be proud of ?
> I fail to understand what is wrong with this. What is wrong in people keeping more of their wealth to themselves ?
It's selfish and antisocial. These are pretty basic concepts, and I'm having a little trouble believing they could be unknown or hard to understand. I don't even think libertarian tracts are usually that extreme.
> If there is something wrong in lower taxes are you implying thay countries with 100% taxes (where you turn up everything you have to your government) would be somehow morally superior or something to be proud of ?
No, of course not. You seem to be conceiving things in very black and white way, which is almost never correct (e.g. there's a lot of space between 0% and 100%, rejecting 0% in no way implies a choice of 100%).
It is not clear to me why being selfish is either antisocial or being greedy is antisocial. Almost all the better societies, more livable societies are where people are free to pursue their own self interest (aka greed or profits). The one like North Korea where government beats people to be "non-greedy" appear to be pretty violent places to live.
> which is almost never correct
I am not seeing either any black or white. You on other hand just called a lot of people antisocial. So people who move out of California to Nevada because they dont want to pay 10% (or 16%) state tax are antisocial ? Seems pretty black and white assertion to me.
> It is not clear to me why being selfish is either antisocial or being greedy is antisocial.
Because greed leads people to harm and neglect others for gain? This is an extremely basic idea, and if it's still not clear to you, maybe you could watch a movie like Wall Street (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/) and pay close attention to the Blue Star employees, how Gordon Gekko is willing to harm them, and how little he cares about it. It's probably not the best movie to teach this, but at least it's for adults and it came to mind easily. It feels like it would take more time than I'm willing to spend to explain it.
> Almost all the better societies, more livable societies are where people are free to pursue their own self interest (aka greed or profits). The one like North Korea where government beats people to be "non-greedy" appear to be pretty violent places to live.
It would probably do you well to just completely forget about North Korea. I'm no fan of it at all, but what you wrote reads like a rough rehash of some melodramatic libertarian propaganda meme (e.g. make and extreme idea like "greed is good" by placing it in opposition to a villain).
>> which is almost never correct
> I am not seeing either any black or white. You on other hand just called a lot of people antisocial. So people who move out of California to Nevada because they dont want to pay 10% (or 16%) state tax are antisocial ? Seems pretty black and white assertion to me.
You totally are seeing things in back and white (or more precisely, pairs of radical extremes). However, I'm not really willing to spend any more effort trying to hand hold you away from that.
Also, the free association argumentation thing is obnoxious. We're talking about tax havens (and a weird assertion that they should be pride-inducing), what do state resident income tax rates have to do with that? Those are very different things.
> Because greed leads people to harm and neglect others for gain
I accept a job offer than pays me more, that is greed but how does that cause anyone harm or cause neglect ? I think you are mistaking lack of compassion on charity to be greed. Which societies or successful people are not greedy in your case ?
> It's probably not the best movie to teach this, but at least it's for adults and it came to mind easily.
I do not take moral lessons from movies. There might be bad people everywhere but greed has very little to do with it.
> rough rehash of some melodramatic libertarian propaganda meme
This is just flamewar. Extreme ideas are a good way to compare principles. Once you agree that stealing is bad, it is irrelevant how much stealing is bad.
The example of North Korea has nothing to do propaganda meme. The observation, real observation is that people are giving arm and leg to move to areas with lower taxes, these areas also have reasonably well quality of life.
> We're talking about tax havens (and a weird assertion that they should be pride-inducing),
Using our logic (or rather lack of) "haven" is a socialist propaganda term. Some political entities have figured out that by having a "BETTER" tax regime they can invite more wealth and wealthy. Singapore an Hong Kong are such great examples. You in one stroke are calling them "greedy".
Not only is factually wrong, it is also pretty self righteous of you.
We just had our cabinet fall over a huge scandal in which the tax authority incorrectly reclaimed thousands of euro's from quite vulnerable people and ruined lives. But also wanted to cut dividend tax for ~<billion euro/year. Worst thing is, the same parties that are responsible for this mess are likely to be reelected.
The reclaiming thing is terrible, but let's not get the populist (election year) comments on dividend tax into the same discussion. By all objective means the Netherlands is one of the top tax havens of Europe, and it's bringing in lots and lots of money. Charging 1% effective tax on Apple, Starbucks etc is really great for the Netherlands and reduces the amount of tax paid by citizens.
Somehow half the general public cheers for the left opposition parties that want to remove these tax breaks because "it's not fair Apple is paying so little". But anyone with any economical sense understands that removing these tax breaks means Apple (and the rest) will leave Amsterdam. They have no significant operations there, just a postbox for the low taxes. The end result is that Dutch citizens will have to pay more tax.
The government knows this very well, but they can't publicly be very vocal about it because being a tax haven isn't very friendly to other countries that are missing out on taxes because of it.
So long story short: If you're Dutch stop complaining, you're saving tax. If you're any other European: you have every right to point out the Netherlands as a tax haven.
I keep pointing out: this system of no taxes for the mega corps is a huge offence against free markets, you are creating monopolies because start-ups and local business actually have to pay taxes and can't compete.
And okay, Apple offers something unique, by why the fuck should I be subsidising a coffee company? They do nothing a random mom-and-pop business can't do, they add nothing to the local economy whatsoever.
I think you give a very good overview, especially by counterpointing the relevance to other Europeans. Nevertheless, even within Netherlands, there is a question of whether 1% is the maximum you could get from these corporations and still leave them with a profit. Could it be 2% or 3% etc. instead? If yes, who pockets part of the difference that is not pursued?
Why should forcibly taking money from other people have earned be a good thing ? A perhaps better idea would be just to ban Starbucks from the country and let government run a monopolized coffee shop. That might be a great achievement no ?
From what I can see the government must strive to achieve as much as possible while taking as little as possible from anyone else. Taxation is theft but has no real alternative but being cognizant of that underlying philosophy would help people find a moral compass.
Governments provide services and infrastructure for public use, some countries choose to make those pay-per-use (e.g. toll roads in France, privatized firefighting in some US cities) and many services are available to anyone. But somehow somebody needs to pay for those services, which comes down to tax on individuals and corporations that reside or register in a country.
What is strange about the Dutch tax haven situation is that Apple (as just one example) isn't really using any local services, they only have a PO box. So they're not paying to get something, they're only paying because everywhere else they would have to pay more. In effect they're robbing the US because they are using public services there, while not paying the tax that is normal for it.
> But somehow somebody needs to pay for those services, which comes down to tax on individuals and corporations that reside or register in a country.
In most of those cases, tax need not be the only way to pay for those services. Government in many cases uses coercion to monopolize some of the markets (roads, NHS etc.) which makes it necessary to tax people. But even if I agree with your basic premise then what % of tax revenue actually goes into funding something that is public good, at least in USA around 40% of it is pure waste.
> So they're not paying to get something, they're only paying because everywhere else they would have to pay more. In effect they're robbing the US because they are using public services there, while not paying the tax that is normal for it.
> they're robbing the US
Not true. Apple is keeping its own money to itself using perfectly legal mechanism. This is not very different from claiming spouse or child as an exemption for an individual.
> because they are using public services there
Paying taxes have absolutely nothing to with which services you use. US is happy to tax American citizens who do not even live in USA nor have anything to do with USA. NY state taxes folks who specifically refuse to stay or work in NY and yet work for NY based employers.
Tax is a classic redistribution mechanism, government collects whatever it can, spends (or supposed to spend on) whoever needs it. It has nothing absolutely nothing to do with what services one uses.
> But as a Dutch taxpayer: Thanks Apple!
That is something we can agree on and Thanks Denmark for making it happen. More money in the hands of US government is nothing but trouble for Americans and thrid world countris where they drop bombs.
If the real rate is 1%, absolutely no large corporation is going to leave if the rate goes up to 2%. Or even 5%. Especially if the location is attractive. (Good English, good facilities, central location, stable country, etc.)
The costs of setting up new offices would dwarf any nominal tax saving.
This isn't 'populist' it's pragmatic. Countries cost a lot to run, and if someone is renting space from you they should be paying their way - not getting an incredibly cheap ride because you happen to have some rooms (spaces) you want to fill.
> huge scandal in which the tax authority incorrectly reclaimed thousands of euro's
These sort of things probably fall under the category of fraud, wrongdoings, crime etc. any ways and I do not imply that you should be proud of these things. But having a lower tax rates etc. clearly is bringing in more business and more trade to Amsterdam and non of this is due to a scandal or fraud. You can definitely be proud of that achievement while denouncing the frauds and scandals committed by the tax authorities.
> But having a lower tax rates etc. clearly is bringing in more business and more trade to Amsterdam and non of this is due to a scandal or fraud
Not really, these businesses are just post boxes with no to only a few employees to be able to claim Dutch residence for tax evasion purposes or to take advantage of the lower tax rate.
> You can definitely be proud of that achievement
It's not my achievement. It's hard to be proud of a scheme that deprives my own and other countries of tax income that could be used for the greater good.
The megacorp tax practices are well publicized and scandalous. I think countries should focus on fostering innovation rather instead of racing to the bottom in taxes in a zero-sum game of getting companies to move HQs
I guess, if you're a citizen and a taxpayer there trying to make a living and you see your government letting the big corps pay nothing in taxes but you gotta pay your taxes to keep the lights on in the country then it's a tough pill to swallow.
Yeah, I guess it's not fair that the Dutch taxpayers and the small/medium sized companies there have to foot the bill for running the country while the trillion+ dollar Apples of the world pay next to nothing.
It's not. Actually the government will bend backwards just to keep the big companies in the country, while hunting down regular tax payers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand... . The tax laws here are ambiguous so that the tax man can judge to his liking whether you are friend or foe.
Except that being a tax haven is a net positive for the Netherlands. Without it Apple wouldn't be in Amsterdam, they would be in Dublin or Luxembourg. And without Apple paying their low percentage on a huge number in Amsterdam, the Dutch would have to pay more tax themselves.
The UK has only just Brexited. There's a fair chance that tax rates will be looked at. Bear in mind that there's now an economy roughly the same size as France parked up off the coast of mainland Europe which has just had the safety catch taken off.
I wonder if the "Double Dutch Irish sandwich" or whatever it's called will get a British tinge soon enough.
I voted Remain FWIW. That seems an awfully long time ago.
Taking off the safety while you're pointing the gun at your own head is not the best idea ever.
Tax evasion/avoidance was indeed one of the primary motivations for Brexit. But that only works when you have a stable financial system - and haven't just destroyed a significant part of your balance of payments by crippling both exporters and service providers.
And then the governor of the BoE tells everyone to consider negative interest rates - which is a superb way to persuade speculators to sell the pound and make imports even more expensive.
It'a almost as if they're deliberately trying to crash the currency.
I suspect a lot of places are trying to at least depress their currency. We're at a weird point in history where a lot of technological influences on the economy are deflationary, to the point that a lot of money printing is required just to keep the inflation rate somewhat steady. Add a desire to be competitive on wage costs against other nations and some of the measures being taken look rather aggressive.
If Britain attempts this, the deal struck on goods with the EU will be unilaterally pulled. Any hope for agreement on financial services will always vaporise
The what now? Airbus, formerly EADS, is the result of mergers of French, German and Spanish aeronautics companies, and the government owned stock ( iirc ~30% is roughly split between them). HQ in the Netherlands makes sense the same way that entity HQs are in different countries - Germant for helicopters, France for civilian airplanes, Spain for military, with of course the added benefit of taxes.
There are plenty of mergers that end up registered in the NL, and plenty of multinationals that do so as well.
Oh the hilarity of that one... French people like to joke about belgian people being fries eater: anytime I hear that kind of joke I ask the french person "Do you know what 'frites' are called in most of the world and how they'll be called for posterity?".
The irony (as in "ironie du sort" / twist of fate) and the poetic justice of that one is plain delicious: the french have long made fun of the belgian for being fries eater, but the fate of the french is that fries in english are forever going to be known as french fries.
Chips aren't known as french fries in a lot of the English speaking world - Maccas (McDonalds) here in Australia do call them 'Fries', and you see that word around the place to distinguish from thick-cut chips, but the only place you hear 'french fries' is American TV. Everywhere else here (and I believe it's similar in the UK) it's just chips.
One exception is a type of chips (i.e. crisps) that are thin and rectangular shaped and were quite popular when I was in primary school but you don't really see around much, which had the brand name "French Fries".
Yes, an important point. This is one thing the Netherlands is far better at than Germany (Frankfurt). I think it's because Dutch is spoken by rather few people globally, whereas German has ~100m speakers, so the pressure to learn English there isn't as strong.
No, it has nothing to do with that. It's policy driven. The Dutch realized they can get in on what the UK was getting if they swallowed their pride and started speaking more English and allowing English as a language of business.
Germans are too proud and expect the world to start speaking German instead.
I lived in both countries, Germans have equally good English, but you would struggle to use English in official capacity in Germany. Whereas in the Netherlands they are very accommodating, and not because they are kinder. They do this on purpose, cause they know they can (and did in fact) attract a lot of foreign money that way.
If you were using the same arguments about the French instead of the Germans, I'd agree. However, for (us) Germans I wouldn't say it's so much proudness as it is about having a huge market by itself (like GP said) and also its industries are very strong, meaning Germany doesn't have to rely on being a tax haven or its financial services as much as other countries. I do agree that Germans have a certain proudness but arguably since WW2 we are also more humbled than we probably were before and it still shows (also because of how much we are being humbled by our education and also by our media culture. Not as much as the Japanese, though :)).
I spent considerable amount of time in both countries and I can clearly say that Germans are not even close to Dutch in their english or willingness to learn english. I don't even want to talk about technology adoption in Germany. That is another discussion.
Top best english speakers are either Dutch or Swedish in mainland Europe.
It's actually the Danes, without question, but they seem to rate themselves poorly in the self-surveys that produce these "No. 1 in English" rankings.
Office-job professionals in all three countries are very good, but for the best chance of the bus driver, kiosk owner, refuse collector, window cleaner, passing pensioner and drunk punk to speak English, head to Denmark.
Hmmm, I haven't found it to be true that Germans and Dutch people speak English equally well. There really is a pronounced difference, especially in the older generations, but also in younger generations. I speak German when in Germany, so of course I have some bias, but there is evidence to back this up [1].
As for how intentional it is, your theory seems plausible. That said, I don't know of any real evidence for it — even if it is an organized conspiracy, most normal Dutch citizens aren't aware of it.
I have a feeling there was no swallowing of pride or anything like that, but it was all Hollywood and market size: US movies/TV series shown in Germany get dubbed with German voices because there's a huge German/Austrian/Swiss market (in terms of population), while for smaller markets like Dutch and the Nordic countries, it was/is a lot more economical to just put local language subtitles on them.
France also has a lot of eyeballs, and they also get dubbed entertainment products.
Whatever it is, they have been doing it for a long time: ladies in their 70s, in the street or at the supermarket, switch seamlessly to English when they realise I don't speak Dutch.
The quality of spoken English in Germany is mediocre at best and often non-existing or terrible with adults. At least it was two years ago when I visited.
Dutch people learn English at young age. British English at school.
Tech industry practically has English as main language. It is not like that in Germany or French.
Dutch people are used to focus on trade with foreign countries. Helps if you speak the language. Youth learn Dutch, English, French and German at school.
Finally, Allies liberated us from the Germans. We remained on friendly terms with each other, though NL is not part of FVEY.
Contrast to French and Germsn, which are both still important languages in both Europe and the World; Dutch is irrelevant...
I think another reason is that kids tv shows used to be broadcasted with English dubs and Dutch subs. That's how many kids learned English, myself included.
Sadly they've moved away from that practice. Everything's Dutch dubbed now.
Also, video games tended to not be translated into dutch. Mainly because it is suchs a small language.
Me and most of my peers learned most english from playing video games and watching movies and tv shows with subtitels, mostly because spoken dutch was not available.
How did that work with games? Did you have to stop and look things up, or did you already have a rough idea and just the exposure increased your fluency?
I’ve tried putting my phone/computer into other languages, but within a few days I tend to phase out the changes and I don’t think I learned much.
Games that lean on conversation, Assassin's Creed for example, will sometimes have Dutch subtitles. Those helped me when I was younger, also enabling English subtitles in series and games.
But tbh a big thing is the exposure at a young age, I tried to do the same thing with Spanish series but a new language simply doesn't stick as well as it did 15 years ago.
A crazy stat for me is that as a percentage of population more people in the Netherlands speak English than do in the US. When people in the US ask me for recommendations as to where to go in Europe I suggest the Netherlands first because it’s so incredibly easy to get around with just English.
They were dubbed for the very young back 30 years ago, and still are.
I prefer to watch in original language (often means English though I am quite fond of German cinema) with English subs. But my mother (~70) would prefer Dutch subs, Dutch dub, or Dutch movie.
Its fantastic we got so much choice. Perfect to practice another language, dabble into it. As already mentioned though, defaults matter.
Unfortunately modern English is rather different to Old English. I can read later Middle English (Chaucer to Shakespear) with some difficulty but Old English is very hard.
The WP page on Frisian Languages has this to say early on: "However, modern English and Frisian are not mutually intelligible, nor are Frisian languages intelligible among themselves, due to independent linguistic innovations and foreign influences."
To give you a tiny idea of what we are up against here consider the name of the town I live in: Yeovil. When I first came here I thought - French obvs! Yeo-ville ie the town on the river Yeo. Hmm how wrong can I get: actually it was called Gifle in the 500s or so, which means "bend in the river" in a Saxonish language long gone - that's your old Frisian/German/Dutch/Angle thing. Morph the G into a Y and the f into a v, throw in a vowel shift and squint a bit and there you go. There are over 60 spellings recorded for this little town, including Euwell, Evill, Ivel and Gevelle. The local rugby team is called the Ivel Barbarians. The river is actually named after the town, which is named for a feature in the river! In Germany there is a town called Wegburg (I had my ears operated on in the hospital there in the '70s) and in England there is a town called Weybury - that one is easy to work out.
Now pull back and look at modern English, Dutch, the Frisian collection of languages, German etc ie all the languages that are collected together as "Germanic". They are all rather different these days. I can't even pronounce van Gogh properly despite having a Dutchman repeatedly telling me how (something like "fan hoch"). I can say Moenchengladbach well enough but lets face it the name is pretty obvious even if you ignore the umlaut and the ch sound at the end - both sounds don't exist in modern English. I failed German O level but on the bright side I also failed French too.
I don't know how correct this is linguistically, but it rings true for me anecdotally. The company I work for is headquartered in Amsterdam and when I hear my Dutch colleagues talking to each other some snippets have an eerily English feel in terms of their rhythm, tone and sound[0]. The best way I can describe it is by reference to this image: https://twitter.com/melip0ne/status/1120503955526750208 - it's composed of familiar looking blobs, but after a few seconds you know you don't recognise it at all and your pattern-matching circuits are just being a bit over-eager. That's the feeling I often get when I hear Dutch.
[0] - of course the "gh" sound is not present in English so when that pops up you are immediately jolted back to reality. It's not even like the Scots "ch", it's further down the throat.
Haha I can confirm this as well. Two Dutch colleagues talking to each other in Dutch, I thought they were talking in English but I could not understand it, my brain got confused but then realised its not English.
100m of German speakers are concentrated in three neighbor countries: Germany, Austria, Switzerland. It's not like a German can go to a different continent and find people speaking their language (like a Spanish or French person would). I don't really understand their unwillingness to learn foreign languages - is it just their pride? :)
Also, in my experience, learning english to do bussiness with other european who also learn english mainly for bussiness purposes gives a different kind of language then learning english for everyday use.
see also "euro english"[0]
That's true for the country as a whole, but in Amsterdam lots of people don't even speak Dutch at all. It was a rather bizarre experience for me to go to a coffee place and order in my native language, only to get frowned upon—English only!
Perhaps the person you encountered was a recent migrant who hadn't mastered Dutch yet? The poor individual is probably just trying to earn an honest living in your country's increasingly globalized city.
I don't know if they were learning or not. They simply expected English. Nothing against that particular individual; my point is that in Amsterdam, English is the norm.
The real reason is that the Netherlands have their equivalent of British Overseas Territories, and use them in the same way: as tax-havens / money-laundering channels. That's something that only a few selected countries can vaunt, language or no language. Denmark missed a trick with Greenland...
Tax offences were not even prosecuted in the Dutch Caribbeans, so of course they didn't exist! Token gestures are being made to change this [1], under pressure from the EU, but do you really think an entire industry will disappear?
That’s an argument for Dublin. Not only do you get English, you also have a simple transition because the ROI has easy access to both the EU and the UK even post Brexit.
While English may be an advantage in other areas, I suspect the main reason the financial industry will gravitate towards Amsterdam is its history and therefore presence of skill in financial areas.
The Netherlands is after all the birthplace of capitalism, corporations and free markets.
Brexiteers have nothing but disdain for the City and finance. They're a know-nothing movement unswayed by economic research and proudly ignorant concerning, among a myriad of hard truths, the realities of operating in the modern global economy.
They think with a simple wave of their plastic sovereignty wand, Britain will be magically restored to some fictional past where a dominant UK thrived in an economic self-sufficiency bubble. No banking sector or stock brokers required.
Huh. Given that the City will lose its preeminent spot in the world of finance, I assumed traders would be anti-Brexit. What's the (typical) trader's reasoning?
>Given that the City will lose its preeminent spot in the world of finance
It wont really lose anything. UK can now start new "tax haven" initiatives (discouraged under EU) and companies will flock there better than before...
London didn't get its "preeminent spot in the world of finance" by entering the EU/EEC etc or because of it. It earned that spot by itself 100+ years before...
The question was wrong anyway. You don't have to "cut back on services as a tax haven". Cyprus, Singapore, Swizzerland in the past, etc, have all kinds of state services...
Maybe the one asking had in mind some derelict tax haven islands in the caribbean or so? Not all tax havens are like that...
No, services cost money and have to be paid for. That was my argument. Still interesting that you guys find that there is ground for argument - an irrelvant topic would not be ground for argument, wouldn't it?
All of this is true, but people drastically overweight the recent past when predicting the future. The world is littered with cities that were global or regional hubs in the past. Things can change.
This problem gets worse when the past becomes an argument for not taking the necessary steps to mitigate any potential change.
>The modern successful UK is almost certainly a consequence of closer collaboration with the EU.
Is it? Or just neoliberalism via Thacher making it more alluring to modern capitalism (succesful for society is another thing) and the same cheap credit flood in the 90s+ that happened across the West?
London financial industry traders and London voting residents are not related.
Greater London residents voted overall ~60% to Remain, but you'd expect that traders live in the Eastern boroughs, and outside London, in Essex (both up to ~70% Leave).
Along with lots of business owners I know. All of them knew exactly what they are signing up for. The OP's message is precisely the problem with the argument from Remain. They didn't answer any question or worries they had with Brexiteers. ( Or they did but it wasn't really what they were looking for ) And the discourse then fell apart.
One example of things the UK have been exporting is audits, to large companies in the EU. UK auditors are no longer accredited to perform audits of EU countries. Now the have to retake an exam, and then work for 3 years as a apprentice of someone who is already accredited. Since there is no one in the UK that is accredited you pretty much have to move to the EU for 3 years to do that. You can imagine that for a lot of people with families that are 40+, that pretty much ends their careers. Apparently the same goes for many other finance and legal professions.
I concur with that assessment 100%. It's quite shaming how it's all been handled. Even worse, I've had to take German citizenship to keep my European internet domains.
I've not yet heard what the pro-Brexit faction gets from this? I mean who are the people who stand to gain? Based on the theory that people are motivated by self-interest.
Putin financed the campaign to sow chaos (just like w/ Trump). Murdock monetizes outrage (again, just like w/ Trump). Neoreactionaries such as the Mercers are against any power apart from their own. Boris and maybe the Tories have longed been anti EU, Brexit is just a bludgeon (wedge issue) for elections.
But I don't understand which stakeholders will actually materially benefit from Brexit.
Especially once Scotland leaves the UK and rejoins the EU on their own.
> I don't understand which stakeholders will actually materially benefit from Brexit.
Two types:
- the spivs who felt harangued by all those reasonable EU rules, and are now free to again abuse the unwashed masses (like Farage selling scams on Youtube, or the gentlemen selling flammable cladding to builders). I knew a guy like this, holding dangerous chemicals in his garage and moving goods from China to Iran without ever entering the EU, to avoid any scrutiny of their debatable quality... Kind man but ethically challenged, so to speak.
- the oligarchs who couldn't bend Bruxelles' ears as well as they can make the weather in Westminster. Some of them are not even English, but London is their plaything.
> I've not yet heard what the pro-Brexit faction gets from this?
Farage is currently popping up on YouTube with some financial malarkey (I hesitate to use the words grift or scam but it does look very much in that direction) that presumably wasn't viable before we left the EU.
I would be curious to get the opinion of someone Dutch on the below:
I was once chatting with a co-worker about why English is so prevalent in the Netherlands and, particularly, why Dutch people tend to speak English with American accents.
My co-workers theory: it's because American English was heavily influenced by Dutch speakers in colonial times. e.g. New York was once New Amsterdam
My theory: in the Netherlands (at least in the 1990s), American TV shows were not dubbed but had subtitles instead. This allowed teenagers who watched American shows to learn English but with an American accent.
They're also just very phonetically similar languages; as an American who visited Amsterdam, hearing other people having conversations in Dutch was incredibly disorienting, because from a distance it sounded just like American English, except that I would try to focus on their conversation and realize that I didn't understand any of the individual words they were saying!
Basically, in my (very limited) experience, a Dutch accent was bizarrely similar to an American accent.
Dutch speaker here (but without such an American accent).
Dutch people tend to speak English with American accents because they hear most of their English from American TV, movies and Netflix series. I'll leave it to the linguists to debunk any suggestion that Dutch speakers had more than a marginal influence on American English.
Pretty easy if you look at nautical lingo: captain is taken from kapitein, also anker/anchor and lijn/line, etc. My favorite etymological explanation:
Back in the day the rudder had not yet been invented, so they used a slightly oversized oar to steer (dutch: stuur) the ship. It was not practical to fasten it exactly in the middle, so it would have to be either on the right or the left side of the ship. Because most helmsmen were right-handed, the oar usually got fastened to the right side, which was henceforth known as the stuur-boord, literally the board of the ship that the steering oar was fastened to. Because the uu-vowel doesn't do too well in English, it got turned into starboard, which is still used today. Coincidentally, because the steering oar was in the way when mooring the ship it became customary to moor the ship on the 'left' side. This then became known as the 'port' side because the port was always on that side.
Rather error prone but it was starboard & larboard before the Royal Navy changed larboard to port. Although larboard related to loading so your reasoning was correct.
presumably these are Dutch influences on English, not specifically American English? We've been interacting with our Dutch neighbours for hundreds of years, especially at sea.
French, Spanish and italian speakers find it hard to pronounce English words as English contains sounds not present in their languages.
But Flemish/Dutch languages have a superset of the English sounds. So it’s hard for an English speaker to pronounce Flemish sounds, but easy for Flemish/Dutch speakers to pronounce English words.
So they start from a position of strength, and then there is plentiful expose to English from a young age as a bonus.
The accent is really usually more of a Dutch accent than it is an American one, though I guess that's closer to the American one than to the British one [1]. I'm not sure if it's been researched, but what would seem to be the obvious reason is that we just hear a lot more spoken American English than British English, on TV, on the radio, and online.
Apart from (and also emphasising) what others have already mentioned: American English (AE) is a rhotic English accent, essentially meaning that the letter 'r' is pronounced when it occurs at the end of a syllable (whereas with many British English or Southern hemisphere accents it isn't).
The Dutch 'r' phoneme sounds similar to the AE one. Hence, Dutch English speakers will naturally sound more American even if they don't have an actual American accent (which might indeed very well be the case due to said influence from American TV shows).
> The Dutch 'r' phoneme sounds similar to the AE one.
The Dutch realization of /r/ differs from dialect to dialect within the Netherlands and Flanders, and only a small minority of Dutch speakers have something like the American version. It is true that Dutch speakers often have good accents, but this is due to massive exposure to American culture, not the rhotics of Dutch themselves.
First, the American accent is actually how English was spoken in England until the 1800's. What you have with American English is the US retaining the older style of English while British English evolved differently.
Now, with Netherlands, England and Netherland were very closely linked throughout the late 1600's and especially the early 1700's. They were both Protestant powers, fighting various wars against Louis XIV and his Catholic France. In addition, at one point, they even shared a leader, William of Orange who became King William of England in 1688. Later in the century, they diverged.
Thus, you have the same phenomenon that you had with the United States, they both retain the old English pronunciation from the time when both were much closer to England. British English evolved differently, leaving both Dutch English and American English much closer to each other than British English.
> the American accent is actually how English was spoken in England until the 1800's
No, it isn't. American English has preserved certain archaic features once found throughout UK English (rhotacism is one), but it has also innovated heavily in other respects just as UK English has. Even within the United States, accents have evolved drastically since the advent of recording technology over a century ago. The standard introduction to this is the work of Labov et al.
Your theory jibes with my own account at the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam. I asked one of the tour guides if he was an American expat, and told me he just watched a lot of “Full House” growing up as a kid.
I'm not sure about the accent—it's not strongly American but definitely not British either (comes off a little posh around here)—but I did learn most of my English through Cartoon Network with subs.
I have a Dutch side to my family. The Netherlands has always been a very outward-looking, global, trading nation. It was a global colonial power and has large multi-national companies. My uncles told me the government always recognized that to be prosperous it needed to interact with other countries and it always encouraged multi-linguism and language education in schools. I'm sure having foreign movies without dubbing is deliberate. (And efficient too!)
Dutch here! I am not knowledgeable enough on this topic to speak for us as a whole but I do know my level of English has been influenced greatly by this, and I see it now in my little sister (who is 12), too.
It’s being taught English as an 10/11-years old and.. Watching all the Dragonball Z dubbed to English but with Dutch subtitles :)
Based off the way New Yorkers and folks from Boston talk, I don't think the 'American Accent' is close to what it was back when NY was still New Amsterdam.
American English is frankly archaic! The English accents of the modern US are far closer to the English accent of the 1700s than modern en_GB.
I am a British army brat and we used to watch a fair bit of Dutch TV when stationed in West Germany back in the '70s/'80s for that reason - subtitled. Mmmm ... Vara!
The accent thing is very complicated. The US has had a lot of inputs over the last few centuries and don't forget the locals who were already there. I suggest that the Dutch accent informed the American one accents rather than the other way around. Belgium of course also contributes there. English spoken by a Belgian also sounds more left pondian than right. That said, I have met folk from both the Netherlands and Belgium who can deploy pretty convincing generic en_GB or en_US sounding accents as required. My dad's driver at our last posting in Bracht in Germany near to Roermond in the Netherlands was able to speak German, Dutch and English well enough to fool native speakers of all of them. We are still in touch nearly 40 years later 8)
It's my understanding (and if I'm wrong it looks like I'll be corrected) but Dutch English classes teach en_GB and you have to be an expat American child to have your en_US ways tolerated. So if Dutch people sound American they must not be getting it in class.
You are right. Back in the early 90ies, in primary and high school, I often got in conflict about this with my English teachers. Distinctly remember being around 10 years old, and arguing with my poor teacher, that US English would be a much more useful standard for Dutch students to learn :)
PS: So starting age 8 I learned English from adventure games and a bit later from shows like Star Trek TNG (BBC!). Starting written versus verbal (often using a dictionary to find the right words to type with those Sierra text interfaces) did mean that some of my pronunciation was totally off — I'd simply never heard most words spoken before :)
My employer moved trading clearing and EU reporting to Amsterdam in 2019 and early 2020 that couldn’t be done through the US via equivalence.
It however did not move any jobs or even opened new positions in Amsterdam, we did grew out London headcount by about 800 people through both hiring and acquisitions.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out for London long-term.
Obviously there’s been massive fallout, businesses decimated, and I’d personally have preferred we stayed in the EU – but it seems to me we’re yet to see what the ultimate result for London will be.
The touted ‘Singapore of the West’ idea is what many say Brexit was all about, and if that takes place it could even strengthen London’s position as a global financial hub and playground of the rich and famous.
In any case, the losers of Brexit will be many of the very people who voted for it who will see public services further cut to pay for ultra low corporation tax.
I believe that things like this are simply unknowable by any rational take because we're dealing with an extraordinary complex system.
To make a statement like "These were the winners or losers of Brexit" you'd have to clone the universe at the point of the Brexit vote, change the outcome of the vote, and let this parallel universe run forward in time. Then you could compare that parallel universe to our universe and see who is better off and who not. This is, of course, not possible as far as we know and probably never will be.
Going in after some number of years and observing that certain parts of the population are better or worse off conflates a ridiculous number of things.
So, in conclusion, statements like "Brexit was bad/good for low/high income households in the UK" are always and exclusively made for political purposes. Which is OK. But let's not pretend this has anything to do with science.
On top of the argument above, there is also the issue of "chaos" with complex systems. "Chaos" means that small perturbations to the initial state of a complex system can lead to vastly different outcomes ("the butterfly effect"; also found this here via HN the other day: http://www.complexity-explorables.org/explorables/double-tro...).
So in the case of Brexit: the outcome in the cloned universe after 5 years could be very different if the pro-Brexit vote was changed to either 49.9% or 49.99%. It could also be very similar, of course.
Long term or short term, there's no counterfactual.
In the absence of a parallel universe or crystal ball, how would you know that the entities who seem to be winners after Brexit wouldn't have won twice over without Brexit? And how would you know that firms and economies that fall behind would have been more successful if "Remain" had won the day?
> In any case, the losers of Brexit will be many of the very people who voted for it who will see public services further cut to pay for ultra low corporation tax.
This is a very traditionally left view of the society. The problem with it isn't that its leftist, but that it is blind towards the opposing side (i.e. most people saying these things would fail ideological Turing test).
Believe it or not, but people may care more than "who's getting rich". EU seems to erode their (Brexit supporters) national identity.
If you ask, "but why do they care about their national identity MORE than them benefiting from things individually", well its for the same reason why from the same group people join the military.
Why would they move? Sure things are getting less centralized just like big financials are slowly moving from NY, but the heart of the city has no reason to move.
Firms move. Then people move. Check out MiFID2 (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mifid-ii.asp). Firms used to be able to satisfy ~~German~~ EU regulations to trade on Eurex, German futures exchange, with HQs in London. Not so after Brexit leaves the UK no longer in the EU.
They managed to take a massive leap towards a banking union and almost certainly wrestle financial power away from london.
The EU managed to force the swiss to accept freedom of movement in exchange for market access, we know that the EU drives a hard price for market access.
We also know that the UK is too fucking proud to admit that its just lost 10% of its tax base. It'll certainly not openly accept any "loss of sovereignty" to get access to the EU's market.
Not only this, but the EU have managed to make the UK pay to annex Northern Ireland. All without a war (yet)
Haha — as a German, whenever I visit the Netherlands I'm verbally assaulted by Dutch friends asking for their bikes back (an artefact of WW2, when Nazi forces stole Dutch bikes for metal).
Isn’t this probably good news for everyone that doesn’t work in finance? London has become essentially unaffordable for regular Britons, partially because of finance salaries driving up living costs (similar situation to SF, from what I understand.)
I think in general, a nation not overly reliant on just one industry that doesn't actually produce anything tangible is probably a healthy thing in the long run. To a very similar extent, Hong Kong is largely the same as London, the city doesn't even know how to make anything other than ramen anymore. 25 years ago, that city made CPUs, not it's completely beholden by mainland capital.
Yeah, I was offered a very nice job over there last year but the housing costs made it basically pointless. It felt like I’d be killing myself just to enrich Dutch landlords and the Dutch taxman. Such a shame.
Amsterdam seems pretty ill-suited for a large population increase. Like San Francisco but worse because you have much stricter restrictions for almost all of the downtown area.
Note that Netherlands is small and has pretty good public transport. You can live in the neighbouring towns and be in the centre of Amsterdam in 15 minutes by train.
> The EU has shown no sign of reversing its position that euro-denominated shares must be traded in the EU - whose internal market Britain left on Jan. 1.
In brexiteer quarters, the expectation was that the whole EU would have collapsed by now and they'd be begging us (I'm a brit) to take their money and thanking us for being right all along and agreeing to work in pounds and furlongs...
I have no stake in this fight, but.. from popular media, and my social bubble, the message seemed the exact opposite. It felt like the brexit people said that they would be able to survive with the same economic level and the ability to make their own laws and regulations, while everyone else ridiculed them with how britain would not even be able to get food, and would collapse into mayhem.
Well we are currently suffering a mini economic collapse. We've lost about 5% of GDP and counting.
There are food shortages (no brocoli, a lot of tropical fruit is gone) just not "we are hungry" shortages.
There are also shortages of other things. I had to wait 8 weeks for a stove because it was stuck in port. My housemates bike is 8 weeks and counting and no sign of that yet.
I don't know about the more far fetched predictions but I'd say the remain campaign is looking about 80% correct and the leave campaign -80% correct...
It should probably be noted as well that predictions of the UKs total collapse were always a small fringe of the remain campaign. Predictions of the EUs collapse were central and mainstream in the leave campaign. Its actually still being predicted now by them!?
Beware: Source is BS fake news crap, not fit for human consumption
"The ICE exchange announced this week that trading in EU carbon emissions worth a billion euros daily will move from London to the Dutch city during the second quarter."
What is, for a nation / union, the benefit of having a "top stocks centre"? Why does the EU care about EU company stock being traded on an EU-based stock exchange?
Is this somehow tax related? Or does it give the EU power over those companies in a way?
Having a vibrant banking sector has been a point of pride for London for a long time.
It's got benefits in terms of bringing in tax money, both directly from the companies and indirectly from their employees.
If you're known as a top location for a given service, it can also make companies want to open up there, if they want to attract talent from their competitors (although this may change as more companies move to remote-first employment)
If you rely on someone else to run your capital markets, at best their crises become your crises. At worse they actively create crises either because that country sanctions you or because they're incentivised to under regulate (since they keep the profit but you suffer from the crash).
Sanctions preventing Iran from working in USD or accessing Western banks have been 100 times more effective than sanctions on weapons or oil at bringing them to the negotiating table. That's why you don't want to rely on foreign Financial Services...
There is tax revenue, jobs and the ability to sanction others. But it's the reliance on something you cannot control angle that makes this a MUST issue instead of a Would Be Nice issue.
You'll get some level of capital gains from profits, along with any corporation taxes.
But crucially you get control over what gets credit and what rules are attached to it.
the EU doesn't really have a banking union, which means that rules money markets are country dependent. As long as london was the EU trading centre, then there would be no banking union, as it would cause london to loose money.
> Is this somehow tax related? Or does it give the EU power over those companies in a way?
Yes.
New York law is dominant in finance because New York City is a financial nerve centre. This gives high-tax paying persons like bankers and lawyers and investors an incentive for being nearby.
While originally it was simply locality, the reason New York law (and indeed English law in other parts of the world) remains so popular for large financial transactions (in the elements where there is a choice of law available) is about predictability - it gets used routinely in transactions where none of the parties is based in New York for example.
In the New York courts, there's a much longer history of relevant cases decided, judges with more specialist knowledge and the system is used to the workload of large and complex cases. This all combines to give a perceived higher degree of predictability.
I don't think it's necessarily union control related at all. From an industry standpoint it makes some sense to have a geographic center so that companies who serve the industry have a place to go and find customers, network, etc. I think in this regard it's largely a spontaneous phenomenon more than a coordinated decision. "Birds of a feather."
The other replies to this are interesting though and it's not all one thing, distributed decision making can be rationalized after the fact any number of ways
The industry surrounding those markets (imagine bankers, financiers, lawyers, salespeople, corporate representatives and an entire swath of service people supporting these guys) creates wealth and employment.
Having top stock markets (and commodities markets) accelerates local economies and makes the city/country more important globally. See NYC, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and in fact even London.
The more the listed companies you have, the more of all of the above jobs.
I still struggle to see the positives of Brexit, this seems like a major setback for Britain's economy, how could they have not seen this coming and still had the political determination to follow through with something against their economic interests?
- True hard-core Brexiteers really do care about sovereignty. They are nationalists.They want nobody but themselves to have any element of control. If that means the destruction of the economy, they are fine with that, like nationalists everywhere.
- The Conservative party has been interested in the idea of the UK as Singapore-upon-Thames. Partly this is about reducing the role of the state (and thus taxes, one might think) and partly about re-introducing a vibrant manufacturing economy. Many of the people who punted this idea are also Brexiteers. Being a member of the EU was a barrier to establishing a low-wage economy that can compete with the East. They view the EU as outdated because it's a rule-based organisation. There are rules on social standards, product safety, animal health and a huge array of other matters. These people will tolerate temporary economic setbacks (ten years?) in the pursuit of jam in the future.
- Opportunists. People who are motivated by power, and will be wherever there's the opportunity to be in control. They will sacrifice anybody else in its pursuit.
I don’t understand how the UK becomes a manufacturing economy without drastically lowering the standard of living.
And the Singapore on Thames from a regulatory perspective is a non starter. If someone is looking to operate out of a Singapore like nation why would they choose the UK? The only reason would be proximity to the EU but the EU will almost certainly erect massive barriers if the UK did anything of the sort. And so would the US. The US would almost certainly not allow the UK to undercut its already low standards.
Any other major country would be better served by simply locating yourself in Singapore or Dubai or the myriad SEZ’s countries the world over are setting up.
I think there's also a mechanism of the extremist positions driving politics. E.g. Brexiteers that e.g. opposed the trend towards further centralization in the EU wanted out of some of the political influence sphere, but were in favor of e.g. strong alignment on industry and goods (I think Grayling at some point said that he "didn't campaign for Brexit for the right to produce motors slightly differently"). But May didn't get that done (and put herself in a bad spot in many ways by putting out statements then having to walk them back), and lost out to more hardliner positions. And the opposition was also quite useless in helping a closely-aligned Brexit along (or even having a clear position at all, since it was also split between positions). Some argue that if the energy that went into trying to re- or undo the referendum had gone into getting a closer-aligned Brexit done during Mays time, that could have happened. But it didn't, and everyone looked bad while Boris promised whatever he wanted.
UK has higher standards for livestock than EU, esp. related to well being and roaming space; which is partly why it is very difficult for UK farmers to compete with almost anywhere else. I think you mischaracterize the disparity of standards in that particular space. I don’t comment on your other points.
If the Conservatives think Singapore's state plays a small role, they must be thinking about some mythical Singapore, because the real one is pretty authoritarian (although it seems to act for the public good) and fairly involved. Also, I think it is easier to have "good" government of a city-state size with a homogeneous population than for something an order of magnitude more people and with a non-homogenous population.
Based on my British Brexit friend, I suggest another school of thought: concern for sovereignty but not nationalist. The EU rules requiring free movement result in people from poorer countries willing to work for lower wages depress wages for British people. Also, the free movement is essentially unlimited immigration and the society can't absorb as many immigrants as have been coming.
> If the Conservatives think Singapore's state plays a small role, they must be thinking about some mythical Singapore
These elites speak in abstract terms, typically of things they never actually experienced or seriously analysed. They largely dabble in ideology, mostly to cover the immediate interests of themselves and their cronies.
why do there need to be "schools of thought" about the opposition when people could just ask them? Seems to me to be another instance of the political echo-chambers around contentious issues like Brexit. We'd have much better political perspectives if both sides talked to each other instead of theorising about the other side in their own bubbles.
Ironic given that Corbyn was also Eurosceptic - Brexit was a bipartisan issue with pro/con arguments on both sides of the aisle.
I think it's more "schools of thought" inside the pro-Brexit groups? (although missing any pro-closely-aligned-Brexit groups, since those got pretty pushed out the solution space in the last years)
If that's meant to be the schools of thought for pro-Brexit groups, it's sorely lacking. Though it goes unsurprisingly under-reported, there were many different reasons I heard when talking to people about their support for Brexit, ranging from critiques of EU's fundamentally neoliberal nature, to its bureaucratic inefficiency, to issues of decentralisation of power, issues of tall hierarchies being too one-size-fits-all, the EU's future if the federalist factions take power, and so on. And that's just the handful of people I spoke to at the time, plus some casual listening to campaigners.
Even the idea that Brexit was driven by nationalism, while at least partially true, doesn't really dive into what nationalism means in this context - it's usually just used as a no-no word.
that's the caricature form, yes, in the same way that communism is just gulags and breadlines. But there are nationalist sentiments like "I value my country's unique culture" that have nothing to do with xenophobia. Or "we should control who comes into the country to ensure we get the right kind of labour skills we need".
Funnily enough, if you want to talk racist anti-immigration sentiment - in my parents' lifetime that was the stock-and-trade of the Labour working class, despite being staunchly socialist (which as an ideology is inherently international). Ideology often doesn't make much sense.
There is the idea of Singapore as a small plucky low-tax, small-government country that's extremely high growth and well-off by being at "the gates to Asia" as a trade and manufacturing hub.
And the idea is that an independent UK could be the same for the (slow, inflexible) EU. Which ignores that Singapore actually has high government investments in industries and does the hub role so well because it has good trade integration with its neighbors. Which the UK had in the EU, but could only expect to keep in a Brexit that strongly aligns it with EU policy (which would stop it from giving too much preferential treatment to its own industries etc)
Let me preface this by saying that I'm European and that I'd like the EU to be successful (and consequently, for Brexit to have been a mistake).
That said, a lot of the reporting on how Brexit is so obviously a bad economic decision reminds me of what was written in the aftermath of the Swiss referendum not to join the EEC in 1992 (see e.g. this New York Times article from the day after the vote [0]). Similarly to Brexit, voters decided very narrowly (50.3%) against close integration with the EU, seemingly renouncing economic opportunities because of immigration fears and a desire for sovereignty.
Now, almost 30 years after that referendum, the data does not support the thesis that the Swiss choice harmed economic development -- quite the contrary. Switzerland has seen a higher absolute and relative GDP per capita growth than any of its neighboring (non-microstate) countries [1].
I do think that the Swiss government was more skillful in negotiating their future relationship with the EU than what we have seen from the British government so far. Still, my takeaway is not to blindly believe the economic "experts" who predict the long-term economic impact of such a decision.
The first article you have quoted does not support your claim that the reporting was that it was an obviously bad decision to not join. In fact, here’s the first half of the first sentence from that article:
> Choosing the security of their traditional isolation and neutrality over the risks and opportunities offered by Europe
It mentions both risks and opportunities, which hardly sounds like a claim that there is an obvious economic cost.
Most of the article was about how it reflects a growing divide between the industrial/business and rural sides of Switzerland.
The closest statement claiming that there would be downsides refers not to joining the EEC specifically, but regional blocs in general.
> The country's political and economic establishment argued that the country would lose its competitive edge if it resisted the movement toward regional economic blocs. Some leading business executives and bankers even warned that investment would drop and unemployment would grow.
And while Switzerland has not joined the EU, it has definitely greatly integrated with the EU, even adopting EU laws in order to be access the single market.
It was put to a popular referendum. For better or worse, those don't always result in the best (for themselves) outcome as many people (maybe even most) vote more on emotion than reason. If it had been left to the government to establish this policy, they likely wouldn't have followed through or they would have had a further out deadline, to allow the transition to new treaties and agreements that would've helped preserve the positive aspects of their pre-Brexit relationship with the EU.
Are you really that naive to believe none of this had been calculated? The decision to leave didn't come on a whim, it's been in the works for a decade if not longer. The British are probably the most cunning of all nations and they know very well what they are doing. There will be setbacks in the short-term, but the UK as a whole will be much better off outside EU. I am European before people start accusing me of being a Brexiteer.
As a British person I think you are giving us far too much credit. The whole thing has been driven by an unpleasant cocktail of ignorance, xenophobia, nostalgia for a lost empire and a sprinkle of disaster capitalism. There is no cunning masterplan.
There is a plan and you will see the results of it as soon as in the next 10-15 years. European Union is a failed experiment and the British have realised that. It acts as a union only on paper, in reality it's a complete disaster and sooner rather than later it will collapse like Yugoslavia. The British saw through that and decided to leave the sinking ship. Good for them, I wish my country never joined the EU in the first place.
UK's economy was a disaster at the end of the seventies and beginning of eighties. They come in EU poor and leave rich, it's very strange to call this a failed experiment.
Norway was also poor in the 70s and they're rich now. They refused to join the EU twice.
The richest, most advanced union of countries in the entire world, consisting of 300-400mil people couldn't help Italy with an earthquake aftermath so it had to turn a blind eye when the Russians sent help. What a shambles. This very same union couldn't deal the migrant crisis and it can't deal with the corona virus now. What a complete disaster. This is where it shows that there's no union in European Union. It only exists on paper, it doesn't act like an union and never will.
New members only serve as a free market of cheap labour and infrastructure and its eastern members have started making their own political decisions lately, some of them clashing with the EU directives. What union, you must be having a laugh!
>Norway was also poor in the 70s and they're rich now. They refused to join the EU twice.
Surely that richness wasn't because of some geopolitical move, or exquisite global trade deals, or tax optimization, leveraged by their independence from the EU - it was because Norway was lucky enough to have plenty of Natural Resources (namely oil).
With that said, you're completely right: the EU doesn't act like an Union.
EU in it's current form is just a marketplace, when it could be way more. You're right about Italy earthquake, and even the whole response to Coronavirus - which resumed was "be careful with borders closing, let's avoid that, here's some money, and vaccines will come eventually we got a good deal!"
If there's no change in the EU, it will fade away and make less and less sense.
For example, I'm from Portugal, and we've been watching China buying strategic assets from us for years because we're in a tight spot, we even issued national dept in chinese currency - yikes. Now there's even prospect of China getting into the old Lages Base in the Atlantic, which used to be leased to the USA.
I blame a lot of this on corruption, but truth be told, there wasn't much interest in the Union in these assets.
>New members only serve as a free market of cheap labour and infrastructure and its eastern members have started making their own political decisions lately, some of them clashing with the EU directives. What union, you must be having a laugh!
EU needs to be more than money, there needs to be some vertical integration with results that must be shown, else this will be just a pit for corruption where people will be fucked over and over again with bail outs and high taxes, while they remain in poverty or a low waged middle class crushed by taxes. We don't like to be a source of high qualified cheap labor, with cheap real state for summer/spring vacations or for retired UK, German, French, Dutch citizens.
It remains the case that the 4 most competitive financial centres in Europe aren't in the EU (Global Financial Centres Index). That's likely to continue once London and Zurich form closer ties.