Money

It will be harder to pick up a last-minute light bulb. You might have to rely on Amazon Prime for a quick delivery of new tea towels. And your local shopping centre will look even more dismally empty than it already does.  There will, in fairness, be some disadvantages to the hardware chain Wilko disappearing. And yet there is no point in pretending that it is any great loss. In reality, it was one of many ‘zombie’ companies, kept alive by artificially low interest rates. Now that capital costs money again, many more will go bust.  Wilko announced today that it was going into administration, and that its 400 stores

First the good news – the fall in living standards may be coming to an end, with wages starting to run ahead of inflation. Now the bad news: it is as much because wages are rising than inflation is falling – which suggests that high inflation is beginning to become embedded in workers’ expectations. Capital Economics is forecasting that next week’s inflation figures will show the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) at 6.8 per cent, down from 7.9 per cent last month. Average earnings figures, it predicts, will simultaneously rise to 7 per cent – up from 6.9 per cent last month and up from 6.1 per cent a year earlier.

The Bank of England has raised the base rate yet again, this time to 5.25 per cent, a high not seen since April 2008. Like a child trapped in the back seat of a sweltering car, the response of many people will be: ‘Are we nearly there?’      Many people seem to think so – that perhaps there will be one or two rises to come before rates peak and perhaps even start to fall modestly next year. Markets seem to think that 5.75 per cent will most likely be the summit.   I wouldn’t be so sure. What stands out most from the Monetary Policy Report that accompanied the interest rate

It is quite right that the Prime Minister has chosen to approve new licences for oil and gas extraction in the North Sea, in spite of the bitter reaction from climate activists, the Labour party – and some of his own MPs. Chris Skidmore, who just recently completed a review of net zero policies on behalf of the government, said this week that the decision to award new licences ‘is on the wrong side of the future economy that will be founded on renewable and clean industries and not fossil fuels’. Yet the Prime Minister is not retrenching on investment in renewable energy; he is hedging the government’s bets. While

The current government will do almost anything to avoid reforming welfare or the NHS. Last month, we were informed school leavers might be allowed to train as doctors without a traditional medical degree in an ill-conceived cosplay scheme. And it was reported yesterday that GPs may be encouraged to refer patients to life coaches, rather than issue sick notes, to help people get back into work. Between the starts of 2019 and 2023, the number of economically inactive working adults with depression or anxiety jumped by 40 per cent to hit 1.35 million. There are 400,000 more people on long-term sickness than before the pandemic. Yet rather than hiring more

If you want a laugh, I recommend an article which appeared in the March 1998 issue of Scientific American, ‘The End of Cheap Oil’. In it, oil geologists Colin J Campbell and Jean H Laherrere used terribly clever models to tell us that global oil production would peak around 2004-05, after which we would be trying to rely on an ever-dwindling, ever more expensive supply of oil, with huge consequences for the global economy. Campbell was so sure of his thesis that three years later he formed the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, coining a new term which would be thrown about over the next couple of decades.

The NatWest saga is fast becoming a textbook example of what some consider to be an ‘establishment’ attack on minority (and often right-leaning) viewpoints. The fast U-turn from the NatWest board which now sees Dame Alison Rose out of a job (Mr Steerpike has the details here) confirms that this was not a nuanced or two-sided debate that the bank originally tried to make it out to be. It’s no surprise, then, that the government has been fairly robust in its growing condemnation of NatWest’s actions. No. 10 insisted last night that it had serious concerns about the bank’s actions, and ministers have been saying it was ‘right’ for Rose to

Not for the first time in his colourful life, the perennial rebel Nigel Farage has the establishment on the run. This time it is the financial establishment and its media allies. The former Ukip leader has already garnered apologies over conduct or coverage from NatWest, which owns Coutts bank, the high-profile podcaster and former BBC man Jon Sopel, the BBC’s business editor Simon Jack and the chief executive of BBC News Deborah Turness. Farage is currently circling NatWest chief executive Dame Alison Rose in the manner of a hungry shark who has scented blood in the water. Not his, but hers. Dame Alison appears to be Farage’s prime suspect in

It will trash the brand. It will alienate its core users. And relaunching and rebranding a failing business almost never works. As Elon Musk drops the Twitter blue bird and swaps it for an X, we will hear plenty of arguments about why the world’s second richest man has made another critical commercial mistake. In fairness, some of them have a point. Yet Musk’s critics are making a mistake by missing the real purpose of the new name. X only exists to kill off Twitter. The rebrand was announced in a typically haphazard way. As of today, Twitter will be known simply as X. It was Musk’s boldest move yet

Earlier in the week, the stock market responded very positively to news that inflation had come out a little lower than expected (even though, at 7.9 per cent, it is still far ahead of where most forecasters, from the vantage point of the beginning of 2023, would have expected it to be by now). Markets have been left largely unmoved, however, by two pieces of positive news this morning: lower than expected public borrowing in June, and higher retail sales, also in June.  The volume of sales was up 0.7 per cent in June compared with May. While that was, in part, due to the extra bank holiday in May, which

Today and tomorrow’s strike by NHS consultants underlines how industrial action has become the preserve of the well-paid. The consultants appealing for public sympathy were, according to NHS figures, paid a mean basic salary of more than £97,000 in the year to March. On top of this they received mean overtime and bonus payments of close to £30,000, bringing their total mean earnings to more than £127,000. Yet not all of these were working full-time. The mean basic salary for full-time staff was more than £105,000. And of course, on top of this they have been offered a pay rise of 6 per cent – which they have rejected. The

Nigel Farage has been cancelled by his bank because their reputation risk committee doesn’t approve of his political views and has branded him a ‘chancer’ and ‘grifter’. This matters to him because, having been cancelled by one bank, it is almost impossible to get an account with another – you are obliged upon opening a new account to reveal if you have ever been turned down or thrown out of a bank before.  Reputation risk has become all the rage in recent years as companies, governments and individuals scramble to protect themselves from the fate suffered by trial by media and powerful regulators. PR firms and management consultancies charge high fees to

It’s been more than two days since Keir Starmer told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that Labour would keep the two-child benefit cap, yet the party seems no closer to finding resolution on the issue. The pushback within the party has been intense, with plenty of people (including, reportedly, members of the shadow cabinet) asking how the opposition leader can keep a benefits cap that he once railed against. But Starmer isn’t budging. Speaking on a conference stage with former prime minister Tony Blair this evening, Starmer insisted this wasn’t an issue of changing hearts, but rather a changing set of circumstances. Speaking about spending commitments more generally, Starmer noted that: