How many more human jobs would there be in xxx, was it not for the unfair competition from robots or automations?

Sir, Sarah O’Connor writes “Britain has been remarkably successful in raising the minimum wage (introduced in 1999) without causing job losses.” “For clues to the productivity puzzle, go shopping” February 22.

How does she know? I have not been in England for some time but when I go shopping in the US and Sweden I sure see plenty of jobs having been taken over by robots and automation. And one of the direct reasons for that is that there is no obligation to pay minimum wages or payroll taxes when employing robots.

PS. Also in order to make sure we get really competitive robots, and do not end up with 2nd class robots we need to tax them, quite a lot

@PerKurowski

CMA. Bank regulators have stopped “the risky”, like SMEs, from being able to compete fairly for bank credit.

Sir, John Kay with respect to personal current account banking writes and conclude rightly in that “In banking too much competition is as bad as too little” July 23.

But in reference to banks and competition, I cannot but remind you of that regulators, by allowing banks to have much less capital when lending to “the infallible” than when lending to “the risky”, have hindered all those perceived as risky to be able to compete for bank credit on fair terms. In fact, on those borrowers already burdened by being perceived as risky, they have loaded up tons of extra weights.

And that Sir has an impact that is much worse than anything that could happen on the level of the service of personal checking accounts… and so that is what UK´s Competition and Markets Authority should really prioritize.

What does Michel Barnier know about fairness?

Sir, Michel Barnier, the EU commissioner overseeing financial services calls on US authorities to apply regulations fairly, “The US must not seek to override EU regulators” June 22. Frankly, what does Michael Barnier, and other regulators know about fairness?

The regulators forced those perceived as risky and who therefore already had to pay higher interest rates, had less access to bank credit, and needed to accept harsher terms for their borrowings, to be additionally discriminated against, by means of causing higher capital requirements for banks than what is the case when banks lend to those officially perceived as not risky.

If that is not unfair what is? Especially when considering that no bank crisis ever has resulted from excessive exposures to what was perceived as risky, as these have always, except when pure fraud was present, resulted from excessive exposure to what had been believed to be absolutely not risky. 

And by discriminating that way so unfairly against the risky, the regulators themselves caused the current crisis, which is something they would have known had they dared to run a simple regression between the real current bank loan problems and their lower capital requirements, as it would have shown a correlation of 1.