Money

How at home Rishi Sunak looks in the company of academics. The chancellor delivered the 34th Mais Lecture this afternoon at the Bayes Business School in east London. Standing at the lectern in his dapper blue suit, he had the air of a cerebral super-monk bred on figs and yogurt. He’s the first British chancellor to hold an MBA from Stanford and he seemed perfectly at ease in this warm, well-lit room full of brain-boxes with double-firsts in economics. He speaks their jargon fluently. Instead of a ‘job’ he talks about ‘an employment outcome ’. His term for a ‘career’ is ‘a fulfilling professional experience.’ And when he refers to

If Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey was expecting to bat away some gentle questions on monetary policy before the Commons this morning, he hadn’t reckoned on Labour MP Angela Eagle. She was quietly frothing with rage at Bailey’s recent suggestion that workers need to exercise restraint when asking for a pay rise in order to tackle inflation.  Eagle began like the late Bamber Gascoigne with a series of quick-fire questions on the median salary of UK workers and care workers. Alas, salaries turned out not to be Bailey’s specialist subject — not even when Eagle asked him about his own. ‘It’s somewhere over £500,000,’ Bailey stumbled, before adding ‘I

Today’s snap decision by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to halt Nord Stream 2 — the new pipeline intended to export vast amounts of Russian gas into the EU — will make precisely no difference to European energy security, at least in the short to medium term. It could force a rethink of Berlin’s longer-term energy strategy, but the bigger question facing energy markets is whether Russia will curtail existing gas flows into Europe. Scholz on Tuesday instructed Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action not to allow the Baltic Sea pipeline to start pumping gas ‘for now’. Halting the certification process puts the project on hold but doesn’t

‘If young Americans knew what was good for them’ the historian Niall Ferguson once remarked, ‘they would all be in the Tea party’. In his first Reith Lecture, Ferguson argued that austerity would be a boon for the young; public debt merely allowed ‘the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn.’ It is certainly true that successive generations in Britain have run up an almighty tab while assuming the next group along will be able to foot the bill. The problem Ferguson neglected to account for was which voters would end up delivering a pro-austerity government into

He intervened decisively. He showed the ability of the state to make a difference. And he demonstrated that greedy, self-interested corporations should not be allowed to exploit ordinary consumers. Only a few weeks ago, the French President Emmanuel Macron was being celebrated by left-leaning economists and pundits for forcing the French energy giant EDF to slash the cost of power. But hold on. Now, the government has had to bail-out the company from the inevitable financial hit. It turns out that the government can’t dictate the price of energy after all – and it just creates a bigger mess when it tries to. Even by the standards of French industrial

OK, I finally watched Netflix’s Don’t Look Up. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it — especially before its effective subtitle for us thickos, THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, YOU F-ING MORONS. Otherwise, the film might have playfully dramatised the more general phenom of fiddling with celebrity bodices while Rome burns. The comet at which I’m looking up could arrive far more immediately than perilous global warming. Money is in trouble. I’m not only referring to a cost-of-living crisis. Money itself is in trouble. Let’s contemplate, to coin a phrase, a basket of deplorables. US inflation just hit 7.5 per cent, the highest in 40 years. UK inflation, now 5.5 per

Who runs the NHS? With a £136 billion budget for NHS England and NHS Improvement eating up 17.5 per cent of tax revenue, there should be a clear answer to this. But ministers were left wondering when the time came to announce what the health service would achieve with its extra £12 billion from the tax rise. I write in this week’s magazine about the row over waiting lists and how ministers thought the extra cash would cut it to 5.5 million — only to be told it could possibly hit close to 11 million. But there was a row over another point too: the timeline for cancer care. It’s

The last time that US inflation hit 7.5 per cent, Ronald Reagan was a recently-elected president. And he, older readers might recall, partly owed his election to inflation. He memorably said during his campaign: ‘inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hitman.’ But what of Britain? Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill gave a speech this morning in which he revealed that the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) very nearly raised the bank’s base rate to 0.75 per cent this month rather than to 0.5 per cent — there was only one vote in it. Should this, along with the news from

Before the pandemic hit, NHS England waiting lists were at a record high of 4.4 million. Three lockdowns later, they’ve risen to six million: an unacceptable figure for a Tory government that has spent years trying to rebrand itself as the ‘party of the NHS’. Boris Johnson’s decision to break his manifesto pledge and raise taxes was directly linked to the idea that the money would first be funnelled into the health service to fix the backlog. So can he now deliver for patients? When Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced his ‘elective recovery plan’ in the House of Commons on Tuesday, he said that the waiting list would start shrinking