The Two Weeks That Will Be (6th July 2025)

The tears of a UK Chancellor would not normally trouble Gilt investors, unless they reflected, whether intentionally or not, the physical manifestation of an unstoppable political force meeting an immovable fiscal object. The detail of the government’s welfare reforms were scrambled together to ensure meeting the fiscal rules for the Spring Statement, only to unravel …

The Two Weeks That Will Be (22nd June 2025)

1. WarOnce again Trump might surprise with the timing of his interventions but not with their magnitude. In 2017 he authorised the first use of the MOAB bomb (in Afghanistan); in 2025 he has repeated the trick with the bunker-busting MOP in Iran. As he headlined in that newspaper advert he took out in 1987, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign …

The Two Weeks That Will Be (25th May 2025)

1. TradeTariff negotiations continue, as they will, ad nauseam, ad infinitum. Trump pops up to push things along, constantly hustling for the deal. Almost the exact opposite of how the EU operates, where a consensus emerges summit by summit, line by line, tortuous text twisted into tortuous text. As soon as the FT had briefed that ‘The …