Money

The $5.79 trillion budget plan Joe Biden submitted to Congress yesterday was more notable for what it didn’t include, rather than what it did. There were no line items on the environment or education – key pillars of his ‘Build Back Better’ agenda – but it did call for a new minimum tax requiring ‘billionaires’ to pay at least 20 per cent of their income in taxes, including on the gains on investments that have not been sold. This will, apparently, reduce the government deficit by $360 billion over the next decade. The President is in a tight spot. Since the turn of the year, his approval ratings have fallen

After unveiling his spring statement on Wednesday, Rishi Sunak found himself under attack from all sides: his personal approval ratings dived amid a media backlash and criticism from his own side. So, the Chancellor’s appearance this afternoon before the Treasury Select Committee on paper made for a painful session.  Over the course of several hours, the committee of MPs quizzed him on whether he thought people were ‘stupid’ when it came to his pre-election tax cut, the impact of Brexit on trade and why he had borrowed a Sainsbury’s worker’s Kia for a publicity shot. When it came to the latter question, Sunak admitted that his team has asked a supermarket worker

Rishi Sunak shared a delightful moment of honesty on the Today programme on Thursday. Mishal Husain asked him how households will cope if, as the Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast, energy bills rise by a further £830 a year – on top of the rises already due to take effect in April. No, no, no, said the Chancellor, you can’t believe the OBR forecast on energy prices: ‘They just take what the market expectation is at a given time, and since they closed their forecast actually the forecast for energy bills in the autumn has come down by £400.’ It was a fair point. Except, if the Chancellor doesn’t think

I said yesterday that I expected the Chancellor to increase universal credit by more than planned. I was misled. I was wrong. Today, Rishi Sunak’s official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility, is explicit about how painful Sunak’s refusal to increase benefits will be for those who rely on them. It says:  ‘Lags in CPI (or inflation) uprating of benefits mean they fall almost five per cent in real terms in 2022-23, reducing their real value by £12bn, and take up to 18 months to catch up fully with higher inflation’. It means those who are unemployed, on very low incomes, or who rely on the state pension, are going to be in

When sanctions were imposed on Russia there was a big exception: Europe was still buying and paying for oil – leading to a bizarre situation. The West was doing everything it could to help Ukraine while still sending Putin hundreds of millions of dollars a day. But how much was that revenue worth to the Kremlin? As sanctions began to hit Russia, the price of Brent crude (the oil benchmark) soared to $130 a barrel, the highest since the 2008 financial crisis: an increase of over 90 per cent. It’s fallen since then but today it’s still sitting between $107 and $115 dollars a barrel – well above where it had been weeks

The Conservative plan to tackle the NHS backlog has, so far, run roughly along the lines of the New Labour approach to the hefty waiting lists in the health service at the turn of the century. More money, more flexibility when using the private sector and greater ‘patient choice’ (which in this context translates as patients who’ve been waiting a very long time being able to get treatment in another part of the country where waiting lists aren’t quite so bad). So far, the main difference is that ministers are just shouting a bit less at hospitals (though GPs might argue they are bearing the brunt this time instead) than

It goes without saying that sacking your entire staff via a ten-minute video call while their cheaper, foreign replacements sit outside in buses is a pretty disgusting way to treat people. True, P&O’s cross-Channel operation has been rendered unprofitable as a result of Covid, but this wasn’t a case of a headcount reduction or management urging pay restraint until the company can get back on its feet again. It was a wholesale dismissal of workers, plenty of whom will have had decades of service. No wonder some refused to leave their ships. How ironic, however, that so many of the biggest critics of P&O this week are ardent Remainers. What