Money

Here’s the Rishi Sunak paradox: he proudly defines himself as a low-tax Tory but under his watch taxes are reaching a 71-year high. There are plenty of Tories who want to ditch next month’s National Insurance increase but Sunak is firmly opposed – mainly because he wants to link up in people’s minds that more money for the NHS and social care doesn’t manifest out of thin air. But pressure is on at tomorrow’s spring statement to make clear what kind of Chancellor he really is. Does he come from the long line of Tories who like tax cuts in theory but not in practice – or does he have

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

The Bank of England has voted to hike interest rates to 0.75 per cent, the third successive rise, which puts rates back to their pre-pandemic levels. Historically, we’re still at ultra low levels, but the rise is anything but insignificant. After the Federal Reserve made its first move to lift interest rates by 0.25 per cent (its first rise since 2018), it was all but guaranteed that the Bank would vote to lift interest rates again. The Fed had been holding out longer than most, with CPI in the United States hitting nearly 8 per cent, a 40-year high, before it took action. But the narrative that price hikes are

Aside from deterring a few tourists, and people filming fantasy epics, closing down New Zealand during the Covid pandemic didn’t make much difference to the global economy. Neither, come to think of it, did Mark Drakeford’s determination to keep Wales free from Covid-19, and even Australia’s dedication to closing itself down didn’t matter that much as long as the mines stayed open. For most of the last two years ‘zero Covid’ policies have mainly affected the people unfortunate enough to live under them and those trapped from returning home. But China? That is something different. And right now Beijing’s almost certainly doomed attempt to crush the virus is as much

Well down the list of things to worry about as the ghastly Ukrainian tragedy unfolds is the high probability that the Russian government will stop paying its international debts. But this risk should certainly be somewhere on that list – as the fallout from past defaults has shown. We have been here several times before. Moscow also defaulted on its debt in 1998, exacerbating a sell-off across all emerging markets. It led to the collapse of a huge US hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, which had to be bailed out to prevent a worldwide meltdown. This came too late to save many other investors from large losses. Ten years later, apparently

This morning’s revelation that the UK economy grew 0.8 per cent in January, the fastest growth since April last year, is welcome news after a Christmas plagued by Omicron – but it’s news that’s out of date, too. As Capital Economics warns: ‘This is as good as it gets for the year’. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the commodity price jump and the cost-of-living crisis will soon show in the figures. Today’s ONS release warns that even in January, businesses were already reporting significant rises in the cost of energy and staff wages. The week after next, Rishi Sunak will present a mini-Budget. The Chancellor faces a conundrum: how to explain the inflation and

With refugees fleeing Ukraine, shells raining down on civilians, and threats of chemical weapons being used on the battlefields of Ukraine, it was surely only a matter of time. Today the British government finally added Roman Abramovich to the list of sanctioned Russian oligarchs, freezing his assets, and making sure that he could not profit from any sales. That will impact his entire fortune, of course. But most of all, it will hit Chelsea Football Club – and radically re-shape the fortunes of the Premier League. Abramovich’s departure will mark the beginning of an exodus of global money from British football In the two decades since a then relatively unknown Russian

The priority for the UK and other rich democracies is to protect the people of Ukraine from the depredations of Putin’s forces. A close second should be protecting the poorest people in our countries and vital public services from the cancerous impact of soaring inflation, made much worse by the West’s economic warfare against Putin’s Russia. The most basic costs of living are soaring. And that means a devastating recession that has already begun for all those but the richest. This blow to living standards will be the worst in living memory, more pernicious than the impact of either the banking crisis or Covid. Talking to ministers and MPs, it is

The sheer complexity – and horror – of Russia’s war on Ukraine makes it difficult to distil the essential points. To take only one example, the battlefront north of Kiev, where the Russian convoy is stalled, is significantly different from that along the Black Sea, where Russian forces from Crimea have made substantial progress. A third front, in the east, is consolidating in Russia’s favour, though the fight was much harder and longer than Moscow expected. Amid this complexity, it is important to summarise what we know so far: 1. Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine appears to be the most catastrophic strategic mistake since the end of the Cold War and