Money

Junior doctors will be staging yet another walkout in the week running up to the election: five days in total, from 27 June to 1 July. It is the 11th walkout since March last year, as the union insists they will not settle for less than a 35 per cent pay raise. The dates are no coincidence: there is no moment more politically fueled than the run-up to polling day. This gives more weight to the government’s argument that these strikes have always been political in nature, and certainly resulting in political consequence: the NHS waiting list rose by roughly 500,000 after Rishi Sunak pledged to get the waitlist falling,

What is Labour’s tax-and-spend agenda? This is an outstanding question the party needs to answer before polling day – and Labour seems to know it. That is presumably why shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves sat in the BBC One hot seat on the first Sunday of the election campaign. ‘I totally agree I have to show the sums add up’ Reeves told Laura Kuenssberg this morning.  But what will be done to make that possible: higher taxes, more borrowing, or a reduction in spending? Unsurprisingly, Reeves did not want to make firm commitments in most of these areas. The shadow chancellor did commit though once again to not raising certain taxes.

This morning, Ofgem announced another reduction in the energy price cap from July. The new cap on the unit price of energy should see costs fall by another 7 per cent, taking £122 off the average household bill. And it didn’t take long for both the Tories and Labour to try to swing the news in their electoral favour. Only two days into an election campaign, the government will want to claim credit for today’s news: an opportunity to remind voters what successive Conservative prime ministers did to protect people from higher energy costs (of course, the Energy Price Guarantee was a large part of the reason markets rebelled against

It more than doubled its sales. It unveiled a new line of microchips. It promised to keep rolling out new products for the next few years. In the end, Nvidia, the chip manufacturer, delivered the kind of blockbuster results that traders and investors had been waiting for. Yesterday’s ‘Nvidia Day’ (as the company’s quarterly results days are now known on Wall Street) turned out to be better than even the most bullish investor could have hoped for. There is just one snag. The company is now powering the bull market. If anything goes wrong with its turbo-charged expansion, it will bring equities down with it. It’s great for the moment

Would waiting another few months to call a general election have improved the Conservatives’ prospects? Rishi Sunak didn’t touch upon this in his speech today, announcing a general election for 4 July, but it seems likely that their broad assessment was no.  One of the big reasons for waiting until the autumn was the possibility of another fiscal statement. Jeremy Hunt’s March Budget left plenty to be desired by many Tory MPs, who wanted income tax cuts and changes to inheritance tax. The hope was that the public finances would improve in the spring and summer, offering up another chance to craft a tax-cutting narrative – and to give more

Since last October, when Keir Starmer declared that he was a ‘Yimby’ – a ‘yes in my back yard’ – Labour has tried to position itself as the pro-housing party. We are now finally getting a glimpse of what this might look like in practice.   Deputy leader Angela Rayner has promised a revitalisation of the postwar ‘New Towns’ programme, which, in the quarter-century from 1946 to 1970, delivered hundreds of thousands of new homes.   New Towns are not a panacea This certainly signals the right ambitions, and if done in the right way, New Towns could indeed make a major contribution to solving Britain’s housing crisis. But they are not

It should come as no surprise that Jeremy Hunt has signalled in a speech this morning that  he will try to make taxation a central theme of the coming election campaign. The tactic has certainly worked in the past. In 1992, fears that Neil Kinnock and his shadow chancellor John Smith would jack up taxes played a big role in a campaign from which John Major’s Conservatives – unexpectedly in many people’s eyes – emerged triumphantly. Five years later, Blair and Brown did not make the mistake of being cast as the high-tax alternative: they promised not to raise any income tax rate, or VAT. The Conservatives have a very

Are interest rates still heading ‘downwards’ as the Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said last week? Homeowners across the country will be hoping so as average two-year mortgages are again approaching 6 per cent. But the latest figures on the UK job market may dampen hopes of a cut coming soon. Britons have continued to receive above inflation pay rises. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics show that – against expectations – pay growth in cash terms is at 5.7 per cent. Even when you factor in inflation, pay is still going up and has now hit 1.7 per cent – the highest in two years.

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee has voted to hold interest rates for the sixth time in a row. Members of the MPC voted 7 – 2 to maintain the base rate at 5.25 per cent – with two members voting to cut rates by 0.25 percentage points. This decision will come as no surprise to the markets, which had already factored in a rate hold. The Bank made clear in March that key indicators – including the state of the UK labour market and the risk of inflation rising again – would influence its decision, none of which dramatically changed in the last seven weeks. The Committee repeats from previous

It’s all but certain that the UK’s exit from recession will be confirmed at the end of this week. Preliminary Q1 data, released on Friday, is expected to how slow and steady growth in the first three months of the year. It is also very likely that inflation will return to the government target of 2 per cent this month, due to Ofgem’s changes to the energy price cap last month and higher energy costs falling out of the data. The return to target may not last – which is one of the reasons hopes for a spring rate cut have been dashed. But all this will help cushion what

For over 20 years, Britain effectively gave up on building new nuclear power stations. But that’s changed now Hinkley Point C in Somerset is under construction. When completed it will provide around 7 per cent of the UK’s electricity. Hinkley Point C is set to be the most expensive nuclear power station ever built. In fact, it is more than four times more expensive on a pound-for-megawatt basis than the average nuclear power plant built in South Korea. Even Flamanville 3, a French plant that uses the same reactor (EPR-1750) and built by the same company (EDF), is set to cost at least 25 per cent less. Why has Hinkley Point C

Javier Milei was taking too many risks. Argentina’s president didn’t have enough political support. And his radical version of free market economics didn’t offer any solutions anyway, especially in a world where the state is more crucial than ever. When Milei won the presidency last year there were plenty of predictions that he would fare as well as Britain’s Liz Truss. And yet, there are signs the medicine is starting to work – and that will be globally significant.   Over the past couple of weeks, the data coming out of Argentina has been far better than anyone expected. This month, inflation is forecast to dip below 10 per cent

How bad would it be if Royal Mail’s parent company, International Distributions Services (IDS), were to be taken over by the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky? Our historic postal service is heavily lossmaking, struggling to maintain its universal delivery obligation and at war with its unions: a foreign owner would surely take an axe to it. Kretinsky, who owns almost 28 per cent of stockmarket-listed IDS, has gone back on an assurance that he would not try to take the company private and has tabled a £3.1 billion offer – above the group’s current market value but well below what other shareholders think it is worth. He won’t win with this

Rishi Sunak’s announcement that the government will increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP has been warmly welcomed, but how much is it really going to transform the UK’s military? Former armed services minister James Heappey was quick to scotch expectations this morning when he said it wouldn’t necessarily be enough to reverse falls in the size of the Army, Navy or Royal Air Force – the money could quite easily disappear simply in upgrading equipment. Nor is there anything particularly novel about the Prime Minister’s announcement: Boris Johnson made the same promise – to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by by 2030 – at the