The next summit meeting of the leaders of the G20 nations takes place next week in Cannes, and the global financial crisis is top of the agenda. A variety of people from around the world are pressuring the G20 leaders to introduce a "tax on bankers". Such a tax has been discussed over the years under a variety of aliases, including "Tobin Tax" and "Financial Transaction Tax". However here in the UK currently the most popular euphemism for the idea is "Robin Hood Tax". Here's a video in which the team of Richard Curtis and Bill Nighy (of Love Actually fame) present their interpretation of the concept:

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One way or another it's been an eventful week for protesters around the world, loosely gathered together under the "Occupy Wall Street" banner.

Amongst the usual suspects, last Friday Michael Moore spoke to Lawrence O'Donnell in an interview broadcast on MSNBC:

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Whilst the Group of Eight and the World Trade Organization chatter away to little effect, and Bill Gates ponders how to tweak capitalism so that the "one billion people [who] live on less than a dollar a day" can benefit from it, you may be wondering if there isn't a better way to organize society. In the 20th century the alternative most often put forward was communism. That doesn't seem to have worked out terribly well either though.

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Back in January Bill Gates spoke about what he called "Creative Capitalism" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This week he has written an article for Time magazine entitled "How to Fix Capitalism". It's interesting that Bill, once the richest man in the world, thinks that capitalism is broken. As he puts it:

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