Money news

Last week I wrote a column elsewhere arguing, among other things, that it is time for the government to look beyond its (almost impossible-to-meet) commitment to a budget surplus at some point in the 2020s and think about a looser target that might allow more public spending, seeking perhaps a primary but not overall surplus. (IE tax receipts equal spending on everything except debt interest.) I mention this not to advertise that column but because I think some of the reactions to it are worth sharing. As expected, one hawkish Cabinet friend was quick to scold me for advocating ‘yet more borrowing’. But another, well-acquainted with Treasury thinking, simply described

At a dinner on Sunday 1st October at the Conservative party conference, sponsored by Barclays, bankers, journalists, MPs and policy experts discussed ‘Brexit and the City: a future that works for everyone’. The event was chaired by Fraser Nelson and the article below is a summary of what was discussed. Banks were the popular anti-hero of the 2008/09 financial crisis. Now, there is widespread fear for their future after Brexit, as they will be required to relocate some operations in order to continue to qualify for ‘passporting rights’ needed to provide financial services in the single market. On the other hand, Brexit could free us from regulation, which in some

Ten years on from the crash, the banks have few friends and fewer still who are willing to speak up for them. Now, with the uncertainty of Brexit looming, there are fears banks and their staff could up sticks to the continent. Like them or loathe them, this wouldn’t be good for Britain’s economy: financial services were worth £124.2bn to the UK last year and the sector accounts for three in every 100 jobs in the UK. So what can be done to make Britain a hospitable place for banks to do business after Brexit? And how can we do that without alienating ordinary people? This was the topic of

Ah yes, our top Brexit negotiating team… Sack Boris! Sack Spreadsheet Phil! Don’t bother sacking Theresa because she’s already had the real P45 from her colleagues as well as the joke one from the prankster; she just hasn’t been asked to leave the building yet. That leaves David Davis as the last man standing but there’ll be clamour for him to go too if deadlock persists, as seems likely despite this week’s talk of ‘acceleration’. So who should we send to the table next? Last week I had the fun of chairing an audience with (Lord) Digby Jones, the irrepressible former CBI chief and trade minister, whose latest book Fixing

The exit bill keeps going higher and higher. No progress has been made on the Irish border, and not much on citizens’ rights. The talks are deadlocked, and you need an extraordinary level of optimism to imagine that Theresa May talking directly to Emmanuel Macron or Angela Merkel is gong to make much difference to anything. The EU seems completely unwilling to be flexible on negotiating the terms of our departure from the club. The result? A cliff-edge hard Brexit is looking more likely all the time. That might be a catastrophe or it might not. We will have to see if and when it happens. One point should be

Just when the Brexit talks were beginning to look humiliating for the UK, the position has begun to be reversed. The absurd EU negotiating framework has stretched the patience of the British side to close to breaking point and preparations are at last being made for the possibility of no deal with the EU. Australians with decades of experience in trade negotiations with the EU tell us that the EU always bargains ferociously and that the only sensible response is a tough one. A negotiating bottom-line of no-deal should have been the British position from the start but going along with the EU’s self-imposed constraints has at least exposed just

Did the 2007-08 financial crisis cause Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn? George Osborne’s answer, 10 years on from it all, echoed Zhou Enlai on the French revolution: it’s too early to say. But at a Spectator event at Cadogan Hall, in conversation with Andrew Neil, Osborne defended not only his policies as chancellor, but also – by implication, and rather unexpectedly – Gordon Brown’s. Looking back, he said, even if Britain wasn’t particularly well prepared for the collapse of Northern Rock and all that followed that autumn a decade ago, there was nothing ‘radically different’ that could have been done to respond to the

Theresa May’s ‘I’m in charge’ message she delivered to Parliament wasn’t only aimed at MPs – it was also directed at Brussels, says the Daily Telegraph. After all, there’s little doubt that Michel Barnier will have looked at Theresa May’s disastrous Tory party conference performance and have concluded ‘she is hanging onto power by her fingertips’. Surely he will have thought, says the paper, Britain’s PM is ‘not in a position to play tough’. If so, Brussels’ politicians would be wise to ‘think long and hard about what life might be like if the negotiations go wrong’. If Brexit goes wrong and the Tories are given the boot, ‘suddenly they

One of the brewing Tory rows of the autumn looks to be over Universal Credit, with Heidi Allen now claiming she has 25 Conservatives prepared to rebel on the matter. They are worried about a number of aspects of the fiendishly complicated reform which is supposed to make the benefit system less, er, fiendishly complicated. Chief among their worries is the six weeks that claimants have to wait for their benefits, which is a long period in itself, but almost a quarter of claimants have had to wait even longer than that to receive their money, leaving many of them unable to buy food. Ministers had been reasonably relaxed about