UK: Anatomy of a Rolling Fiscal Crisis

Summary The Challenge The large Labour majority hides a serious problem for the Gilt market: the government has no mandate to deliver a credible plan. Simply being a change from the Conservatives whilst taxing jobs, farmers and family businesses and removing benefits from the old and the disabled does not a policy platform make. Even …

The Summer That Will Be 2025

“Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time”. This is how a member of the Trump administration has described their political strategy to the New York Times. Just because it’s the summer doesn’t mean the momentum will ease. If anything, a reality TV star President entering his ninth decade with a year until the mid term elections will …

Labour Rebels

++ With thanks to Tom Berey and the team for their hard work ++

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 …