Plastic Pound notes - Bank of England seeks views on changing the paper notes to plastic

The central bank said on Tuesday it would ask the public its opinion before taking a decision in December on whether to adopt polymer pounds that also would be smaller than current notes.

Governor Mark Carney introduced polymer banknotes while head of the Bank of Canada in 2011 and credited the material for a sharp drop in the rate of counterfeiting.

The Bank of England has issued paper banknotes ever since the central bank was created in 1694 as a way of raising money for King William III's war against France. The first fully printed notes appeared in 1853. Before, notes were handwritten and signed by one of the bank's cashiers.

Polymer banknotes, as well as being hard to fake, are durable and stay cleaner for longer because the material is more resistant to dirt and moisture, the Bank of England said, adding feedback so far on the new-look notes had been positive.  However, would it be easier to make plastic notes at home and use them in shops as forgery? This could damage the economy, as we are slowly climbing out of the crisis. 

Apple Avoiding High Tax Rates

Last year Apple paid a respectable 2.5% corporation tax outside of the United States, on it's profits. Since then, that figure has dropped to just 2% this year.Some people may say that this can be classed as tax avoidance, as the tech giants only paid £445m on foreign pre-tax profits of £23bn; this is a rate of 1.9%. However, nothing suggests that this scheme is illegal.

Apple is now one of the companies which pay low tax rates overseas, Facebook, Google and Starbucks have been part of this for a while now. This 'tax avoidance' is leveled out by the UK, no surprise there. Every firm pays large amounts of tax and raise big amounts of VAT, in the United Kingdom. Seeing as Apple leads most of it's business through Europe they end up paying a lot of that. The Caribbean Islands provide some sort of tax haven for many multinational companies, who manage to pay way under the corporation tax rates by using these tax havens. Nobody expected Apple to be avoiding tax rates in some way; to get loads of profit each year so there's nothing to worry about. In your interest, their total profits for the year went up by an astonishing 24%.