Money

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un vowed last night to ramp up his country’s nuclear arsenal. Such weapons don’t come cheap, especially for a state targeted by stringent sanctions and with a stagnating economy. So where does the money actually come from? Kim Jong-un appears to be using cyberspace – and stolen cryptocurrency – to pay for his expensive habit. Pyongyang’s global army of hackers are often labelled as technologically backward. The reality is rather different. Unfortunately for the country’s victims in the West, Kim’s cyber crooks are as sophisticated as they come. A UN report earlier this year concluded that the country has used stolen cryptocurrency to fund its weapons programmes. But

Any Conservative who doubts that Labour’s promise to abolish non-dom status could seriously damage the government needs to look at the fate of Rishi Sunak. So recently the heir apparent to the Tory leadership, Sunak has this week plunged to bottom in a poll of the most popular cabinet members. It comes, of course, just a couple of weeks after the revelation that Sunak’s wife was living in Britain as a non-dom – a status which according to one estimate could have saved her up to £20 million in tax over the years. And this was a poll of Conservative party members, so goodness knows how much the revelation has

The latest warning was stark – that China’s population will shrink this year, more than a decade faster than forecast, and the country will become a ‘super-aged’ society by 2035. The economic implications will be a ‘huge thing’. This came not from what Beijing has dismissed as ‘western doomsayers’, but from Zheng Bingwen, director of the Center for International Social Security Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and one of China’s most respected observers of population trends. He said the ratio of pensioners to workers will rise to 25 per cent in 2030, is expected to exceed 43 per cent in 2050, and is happening much faster compared

If Boris Johnson is forced from office by his own MPs, partygate will only be part of the story. Another huge part of it will be his failure to appreciate the full scale of the cost of living crisis now washing over millions of households – especially his reluctance to address the issue of energy bills. Asked on his Indian trip whether he would consider removing the levies which make up around 25 per cent of electricity bills and around 4 per cent of gas bills he replied:  I want to do everything we can to alleviate the cost of living, but there is a lot of prejudice against the

This time last year, Netflix was fêted as the future of television. Its subscriptions grew by 30 per cent over 2020 as people bought in entertainment during lockdown. Netflix always warned that its growth would slow afterwards and the market seemed to accept that. But its shares have halved since their mid-November peak after a radical reappraisal of its fortunes. What’s going on? Those shares plunged 27 per cent in pre-market trading when Netflix said that, rather than see growth slowing to a mere 2.5 million more subscribers as it had expected for the first three months of this year, it has entered decline – actually losing 200,000 subscribers. A small dent on its

Colombo, Sri Lanka Some 13 years after the end of a civil war that saw 100,000 deaths, Sri Lanka is once again on the cusp of serious violence. Earlier today, the police opened fire on protesters in the town of Rambukkana. One person has died and at least ten people are said to be in critical condition. It’s the first use of deadly force against demonstrators who seem to have filled the entire island in recent weeks. Grainy footage shows half-conscious bodies being carried into hospital, bullet casings littering the quiet palm-lined streets. This was meant to be a time of celebration. Buddhists are marking the new year while the

So, it’s official. The global rating agency S&P has determined that the Russian government has defaulted on part of its international debt. In itself, this is not as big a deal as it may sound. Nonetheless, the circumstances have revived concerns about the future of the US dollar as the reserve asset of choice for central banks around the world. Russia is now judged to be in ‘selective default’ because it has attempted to repay holders of two US dollar-denominated bonds with Russian roubles. At the very least, this is a technical breach of the terms of the debt. It will also probably lead to some material losses for bondholders,

No. 10 was an endless series of parties. The Chancellor was more interested in socializing than sorting out the economy. And the Prime Minister was imposing rules on everyone else that he cavalierly ignored himself. It remains to be seen whether Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak can survive the fines handed out for breaking the lockdown rules and the public anger over their behaviour. And yet, in reality, there is a far larger lockdown scandal and one that will cause far more lasting political damage: inflation. The ‘partygate’ scandal, and its fallout, has distracted attention from yet another sobering set of inflation statistics. Today we learned that prices are now rising

It could be Kwasi Kwarteng, the business minister. Or Nadhim Zahawi, the education minister, and before that the minister who helped make the vaccine roll-out such a success. Or perhaps Sajid Javid will even get his old job back. With an investigation opening into his financial affairs, and with questions over his judgment growing by the day, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak is increasingly damaged goods. It won’t be long before there is speculation about who will get the second most important job in British politics. But hold on. It doesn’t matter so much who moves into No. 11. What is important is that the next Chancellor clears out Sunak’s policies

How is the UK’s economic bounce back from the pandemic years going? Next week the Office for National Statistics will provide us with a host of new monthly data, including an economic growth and labour market update for the month of February and the headline inflation rate for March. The inflation rate is the real kicker. While GDP and labour market headlines from February will allow us to further gauge how strong the economy was at the start of the year, March’s CPI rate will factor the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This has undoubtedly had an impact on prices: the cost of energy, in particular.  There’s little doubt

It is been a familiar story in recent years: a Budget that sounded reasonably good when delivered, but that unravels in subsequent days. Rishi Sunak’s spring statement was no exception. When he delivered it a fortnight ago, he said he was going to compensate low-earners by raising the primary threshold for National Insurance, bringing it into line with income tax and relieving people who earn less than £12,500 from having to pay NI at all. But as the 1.25 percentage point rise in National Insurance kicks in today, it turns out that the rise in the threshold for NI will not take effect for another three months, on 6 July.

This week we will find out how government intends to end any UK reliance on Russian energy and tackle rising household bills. While the war in Ukraine has brought the problems with our energy policy into sharp relief, it has highlighted issues that have been decades in the making. The government’s long-awaited ‘energy independence plan’ has been delayed, not just by wrangling between No. 10 and the Treasury over how it will be funded, but because the Conservative party is fundamentally split on the best way forward. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng is a sworn enthusiast for green energy sources, yet Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg has urged Boris Johnson to

Teslas will be permanently trending. So perhaps will space rockets. Petrol cars will be quietly forgotten about. And if you get enough likes and followers perhaps you might win a place on the planned space colony on Mars. With the news that Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, and one of the richest men in the world, has today taken a 9.2 per cent stake in Twitter there will be lots of jokes about how he might change the social media site. But by far the most significant one is this. He could shift it to the libertarian right. That really would be significant. Twitter shares soared by 25 per