Money digest: today’s need-to-know financial news | 14 March 2016

With just a couple of days left before the Budget, it came as no surprise to find the weekend press brimming with speculation about the Chancellor’s red box. While George Osborne did the rounds of the Sunday TV shows, news of proposed spending cuts dominated the headlines. The Observer devoted its front page to suggestions that Osborne is under pressure to shelve proposed tax cuts for higher earners. The Resolution Foundation thinktank called on the Chancellor to scrap this key Tory election pledge. Meanwhile, writing in The Sun on Sunday, Osborne appealed to its readers to ‘graft now, pay later’ but failed to go into any detail on policy. And, speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, the Chancellor reiterated his message that the UK has to ‘act now rather than pay later’. He said that spending cuts would be ‘equivalent to 50p in every £100’ of public spending by 2020, which was ‘not a huge amount in the scheme of things’.