Money

It wasn’t until I received a notification from the Monzo app that I realised I’d spent nearly £10 on two coffees. This wasn’t in the Wolseley or even within the M25, but in Two Magpies, a café in Holt, our local market town in Norfolk – for two regular lattes (admittedly with an extra shot, since it was Monday morning) for myself and a friend. Just last year, I was taken aback when my caffeine fix crossed the £4 threshold, with the barista casually mentioning that coffee prices were rising. But £4.70 feels like it’s firmly in the ‘taking the mickey’ territory. I haven’t been back since (I’m currently writing

I follow the YouTube postings of a maverick young economist called Gary Stevenson, author of The Trading Game. Whatever you think of Gary, he is absolutely right about one thing. Economists, by using what are called ‘Single Representative Agent’ models, have taken a dangerous wrong turn. Such simplistic models, which contain the convenient but absurd assumption that what is good for the average person must be proportionately good for everybody else, have allowed economists to make confident pronouncements on policy while ignoring social and intergenerational inequality completely. In one of the Brexit TV debates, a woman in the audience was derided by the cognoscenti because, on being told that leaving

Among British car factories, Nissan at Sunderland is the most productive and Jaguar Land Rover at Solihull probably the most advanced. As for industrial landmarks, the former British Leyland complex at Longbridge is reduced to a research and development facility for Chinese-owned MG; but ‘Plant Oxford’ at Cowley, the original home of Morris Motors now owned by BMW of Germany, still produces 1,000 Minis per day. And BMW’s decision to halt a £600 million project to build electric Minis there is, I fear, a moment of destiny for the whole UK auto industry. The truth is that the transition to electric cars has descended into chaos. Total UK car production

I am delighted that The Spectator is launching a campaign to highlight the grotesque levels of financial waste in government. Of course public sectors worldwide have always defaulted towards profligacy – but we are in different territory now. Our GDP per capita is declining: through immigration, the population is growing faster than the real economy is growing. We have no more capacity to borrow – we are already paying 25 per cent more than the Italian government for ten-year debt. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves love to talk bullishly about growth, but they don’t understand that taxing the productive sector more and more and discouraging employment through onerous new regulations

M y husband earns more than me. A lot more. I am, of course, extremely fortunate to be in such a position and am extremely grateful, especially when a large bill arrives on the doormat. So what, I hear you say. And you’re right – this is hardly a newsflash. According to the Office for National Statistics, the majority of couples in this country operate at a persistent gender pay gap in which the wife earns less than their husband. When we had our first child, the door to economic parity slammed shut behind me and has never opened since In our highly gendered arrangement, my husband – a ‘Trad

This is the article I have thought about writing for years, but I have always ended up asking what would be the point. And how annoying that some people would call it ‘brave’, meaning shameful. I’ve always earned a lot less money than my wife. There, I’ve said it. Is that still a big deal these days, a difficult thing to admit? Yes and no – and the ambiguity is rather interesting. Our culture claims to be liberated from old stereotypes about gender roles. But is it hell. Even its progressive urban elite is ruled by stubborn visceral traditionalism when it comes to gender and money. I’m prompted to share

In they pour, one after another, cheerily thudding on to the doormat: ‘Thank you for insuring with us again! Now, pay us more than you earn in a year!’ Yes, it’s insurance premium renewal time – and they’re shooting up once more. Insurance premiums have swollen unstoppably, expanding upwards for all the world like a batch of evil mushrooms. In our household, home insurance alone now comes in at the same size as a monthly mortgage payment. Whack on to this car insurance (necessary), pet insurance (necessary?) and health insurance (in this day and age, yes), and you’d have to be earning the annual equivalent of Andorra’s GDP. What are

There are many, mutually reinforcing causes of the property crisis: it is too easy to borrow; there are too many people; there aren’t enough houses; what houses do exist are in the wrong place; and many houses have the wrong people living in them. Solutions exist to all of these, some of which involve building and some of which don’t. In south-east England it is not uncommon to find people living in£1 million homes who are skint Today we are going to focus on the fifth problem. Too many people are living in houses which are too big for them. In south-east England it is not uncommon to find people

Anyone hunting for a ‘Trump trade’ at this late stage has probably missed the US election bus. If you bought gold as a traditional safe-haven asset back in February at £1,600 an ounce, you’d be a smug 33 per cent up by now – though my man in the bullion market tells me the rise is by no means all to do with presidential hopes and fears. There has also been big buying from China possibly linked to moves, with Russia and other unfriendly actors, towards ‘de-dollarisation’ of world trade using a partially gold-backed alternative currency. Which means there could be more upside ahead, my man says, and gold ETFs

My friend Tim Leunig is a cerebral thinker of the best kind. Though not party-political, he has worked for Tory chancellors and would give the same advice to governments of any stripe. Wikipedia calls him a prize-winning economist and that’s right, but he has a gadfly instinct and a remorselessly rational intellect that takes him into the deeps: into first principles, logical consequences and the reductiones ad absurdum of some of our trains of argument. He writes a substack (timleunig.substack.com) and it was his recent summary there of proposals he wrote as chief economist for the Onward thinktank that caught my eye. ‘I bought this house from savings that were

I was on my way to a Pilates class when I spotted Paul waving at me urgently from across the road at the bus stop. ‘Can you help, Miss,’ he said. ‘It’s Gladys, she’s in a bad way.’ I looked down at his Staffordshire bull terrier and immediately saw what he meant. The 16-year-old dog was trembling, panting and appeared to be struggling to stand. She’d also lost a lot of weight. I’ve known Paul and Gladys for the past eight years, running into them on the street near my home in east London. Paul is not wealthy and has a couple of disabilities. He always calls me Miss. ‘She’s