Money news

Tuesday

Why are NHS funding critics silent on Quantitative Easing?

After the prime minister’s announcement that the NHS would be given a large boost in funding only partly paid for by taxes, some backbenchers called for fiscal responsibility. For them it is paramount that a government should live within its means and avoid increasing the budget deficit. And yet they have nothing to say about monetary policy. Quantitative Easing (QE), the creation of money out of thin air by the Bank of England, with the intention of boosting demand has been carried out in a manner highly beneficial to owners of existing assets. The Bank’s website explains how it works. It buys bonds from the private sector with money that

Sunday

Isabel Hardman

The ‘Brexit dividend’ for the NHS is Theresa May’s new Magic Money Tree

So the Tories have, as The Spectator predicted last month, announced an extra £384 million a week for the National Health Service – something Theresa May was perfectly happy to sell this morning as being the ‘Brexit dividend’ that Boris Johnson had been pressuring her for. This is an odd choice, given it is impossible to know what the real ‘Brexit dividend’ will be when we haven’t yet left the European Union. Indeed, May couldn’t say very much at all about how this extra NHS money will be funded: that’s presumably because no Prime Minister wants to tell voters how much more tax they’ll be paying, regardless of whether that

Friday

James Kirkup

QE is the biggest thing in politics but politicians aren’t talking about it

Essay question: what was the most consequential British public policy decision taken in the last 10 years? Clue: it wasn’t David Cameron’s call on an EU referendum. It wasn’t even done by a politician. The biggest thing in British public life since 2008 has been the Bank of England’s emergency stimulus package for the UK economy. It probably averted an even worse economic crisis. It possibly allowed or perhaps necessitated the Coalition’s fiscal austerity. And it skewed the distribution of economic advantage in favour of people who own stuff, especially houses. Whether or not quantitative easing increases income inequality is still up for debate (even the BoE’s economists aren’t really

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The NHS bus pledge could have a sting in the tail for the Tories

Today’s newspapers have managed to catch up with our cover story from last month: Theresa May has agreed to a massive cash splurge on the NHS. Rather than wait until the spending review to announce this, there will be a political stunt presenting the cash as a 70th birthday gift to the health service. But it is instructive nonetheless: it underlines how this is not a serious assessment of the health service’s needs but a politically motivated gesture. Once it would have been opposed by the fiscal hawks in the Tory party but now these people tend to be keener the Brexit bus pledge of £350m a week for the

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

It’s not always true that bosses should walk the plank when something goes wrong

Should he stay or should he go — or will he already have gone by the time you read this? These are frequently asked questions about chief executives whose businesses hit troubled waters. It’s true that the higher you rise, the higher the risk if you don’t deliver, but it’s not always true that bosses should walk the plank whenever something major goes wrong: sometimes it makes more sense to stick around, take the flak and solve the problem. However, in the cases of Gavin Patterson of BT (ousted a week ago) and Paul Pester of TSB (still in post as we go to press), it would be fair to

Wednesday

Steerpike

Stormzy’s Labour Live price tag

Jeremy Corbyn has promised to deliver ’21st century socialism’ to the UK if elected. Only Mr S isn’t so sure all Corbynistas are on the same page as to what this will mean in practice. With the ill-fated LabourLive festival just four days away, the blame game has already begun on who is at fault over the low ticket sales. Making matters worse, is the fact that things could have been so different had the organisers managed to get Stormzy to perform. The chart-topping Grime artist is a big Corbyn supporter; ‘My man, Jeremy! Young Jeremy, my guy. I dig what he says.’ While his omission was first blamed on scheduling issues,

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Sex and the City: the paradox of women bankers who can’t negotiate a bonus

I am sure there must have been a time when feminism was concerned with the interests of the low-paid and disadvantaged – before, that is, it became almost wholly concerned with powerful, well-paid women demanding even higher money. Nicky Morgan and her Treasury Select Committee have found an injustice which puts into the shade the gross injustices suffered by female BBC presenters on £150,000 a year. They have identified a ‘gender bonus gap’ in the City which they say is a whopping 67 per cent. The reason, contends Morgan, is that female City workers are put off by the grubby business of having to negotiate their own bonuses. This practice,

Monday

Ross Clark

Donald Trump is right: Western food markets are protectionist

In Donald Trump’s dealings with Kim Jong-un it is possible to decipher a strategy of creative destruction: stir things up, so that relations cannot seem to get any worse – and then get down to doing business. Might the same process also be in operation in Trump’s trade war with his G7 allies? The President’s tweet about Justin Trudeau being ‘dishonest and weak’ was undoubtedly rude and, as some like to put it, ‘against the norms’ of international diplomacy. Yet the beauty of it was in the last line: “ Our Tariffs are in response to his of 270% on dairy!”. Trump has pissed in the soup, and in doing

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Labour Live will cost the party more than money

The farce that is Labour Live rumbles on. With the Jezfest set to take place this weekend, the organisers are still struggling to shift tickets to the musical bonanza – which bills The Magic Numbers and Kate Osamor among its headliners. The Times today reports that ‘sales’ are still said to be stuck at around the 3,000 mark despite the venue – White Hart Lane Rec – having a 15,000 capacity. Labour MPs are growing increasingly concerned about the whole affair and asking Jenny Formby, the general secretary, who is currently footing the estimated £1million cost of the event. She has kept tight-lipped. But even if it is the Labour party

Sunday

Roger Alton

Is Gareth Bale worth 20,000 times more than Bobby Charlton?

I must have missed the memo when it became compulsory for major football matches to operate as a marketing opportunity for the game’s marquee players, but that was what we got at Kiev after Liverpool were outmuscled and outplayed by a flinty-eyed Real Madrid. After Ronaldo announced that his time at Madrid was in the past, then our very own Gareth Bale, he of the annoying man-bun and sublime skills, in a rather graceless piece of scene-stealing, decided to ask for a transfer. Live on TV. Well, you do the math. He is on £300,000 a week (or £600,000 depending on who you trust), but assuming someone somewhere has to

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

In praise of Pret

I shop at WH Smith with gritted teeth but I positively salivate when I spot a Pret A Manger. Some serious investors think likewise: the sandwich chain has just been sold for more than £1.5 billion by the US investment firm Bridgepoint to JAB Holdings, the vehicle of the German billionaire Reimann family who also own Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Kenco coffee. Though recently criticised by the Advertising Standards Authority for describing its sandwiches as ‘natural’ when there are E-numbers in its bread, Pret has sustained the authenticity of its brand while expanding globally with the hand of high finance on its shoulder. That included, for a decade, the incongruous

Friday

Daniel McCarthy

If this is a trade war, the United States will win

Donald Trump is following through on his threat—or promise, as his voters see it—to impose steep tariffs on foreign goods in the name of supporting American industry, starting with levies of 25 per cent on steel and 10 per cent on aluminium imports. Allies and neighbours that had been granted temporary exemptions are now set to feel the brunt of the tariffs: Canada is America’s leading source of foreign steel, and Mexico and the European Union will also feel the pain. They’re all threatening to retaliate, and the press is calling this a trade war. If this is a war, it’s one the United States will win. The thing to

Thursday

James Forsyth

Trump’s trade war is back on

The threat of a global trade war is back. The Trump administration has announced that the US will impose tariffs on aluminium and steel imports from the European Union, Canada and Mexico. The EU is already promising to respond to Trump’s tariffs in kind. It is all too easy to see how this situation escalates. The EU slaps tariffs on bourbon and Harley Davidsons in response, an infuriated Trump then hits a slew of EU products with tariffs and on it goes. The Trump’s administration decision to impose tariffs is a historic mistake. Not only will it make these goods more expensive for the American firms that are using them

Thursday

Kate Andrews

The NHS is broken and more money isn’t the answer

A week doesn’t go by without at least one horror story about the National Health Service hitting the headlines. But today you can take your pick. From the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which says the NHS will need £2,000 a year from each household to stay afloat, to the Care Quality Commission’s warning about patient safety in A&E, there’s a plethora of evidence that the NHS is on its last legs, and in desperate need of restructuring.  Many of the reports of the crisis in the NHS call for increased funding to compensate for the system’s underperformance. This week’s Spectator cover story reveals that Theresa May will be gifting the NHS the

Wednesday

Karen Yossman

Oxford’s problem? The sorry state of British state schools

Never does the disdain for state education become more apparent than when the conversation turns to Oxford and Cambridge admissions. Not from the distinguished universities themselves, mind you, who, despite what the media might have you believe, welcome all applicants regardless of their background. But from our political classes, particularly those on the left, who seem to believe state school pupils are so universally hopeless they can’t get in without demanding the universities lower the bar. Politicians such as David Lammy, whose obsession with Oxbridge knows no bounds, demand changes to the Oxford and Cambridge admissions system – such as moving from collegiate to centralised admissions – because it is

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

The snobs won against the FOBTs

It’s good to see that for all their bickering over Brexit and war of words over austerity, the Tories and Labour are firmly united on one point of view: that the poor must be saved from themselves. That the wretched are incapable of making sensible choices and therefore their betters must step in and make choices on their behalf. Behold the great bipartisan belief of 21st-century British politics: paternalism. How else do we explain the cross-party effort to reduce the maximum bet one can place on a fixed-odds betting terminal — or FOBT — from £100 to £2? The government unveiled this state-mandated reduction in how much of our own

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Chris Grayling’s railway fantasy is costing the Tories

Yippee! Now I can finally take a train to Scotland without putting money into Richard Branson’s pockets. This afternoon’s announcement by Transport Secretary Chris Grayling that the franchise on the East Coast mainline is to be taken back into the government’s hands returns the railway to the position it was in between 2011 and 2015. As the unions have been only too quick to point out today, this is the third time that a private operator has come to grief on the East Coast mainline in 10 years – and there is little to suggest that things will be any different when, as Grayling says he wants to do, the

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Has Britain reached ‘Peak Wealth’?

So the year-long squeeze on real earnings is now officially over. Figures released by the ONS this morning show that average earnings in the first three months of this year were 2.9 per cent ahead of what they were in the same period of 2018, while CPI inflation was 2.7 per cent ahead. In other words, we are all, on average, 0.2 per cent better-off than we were last year. That is no great deal, it has to be said, and continues the poor run of growth in real incomes ever since the global economic crisis of a decade ago. It is unprecedented in the industrial era to have had

Monday

Isabel Hardman

May briefs MPs on customs options as timetable for decision keeps slipping

Tory backbenchers have been briefed today by the Prime Minister on the different options for Britain’s customs arrangements with the EU after Brexit. There was a presentation on the two different plans, and a summary which one MP who attended described as ‘everything is just going terribly well’. The expression on this MP’s face suggested that he didn’t necessarily agree with that assessment. These briefings are taking place as the two working groups in Cabinet meet to discuss the two options set before MPs today: the ‘max fac’ solution or the new customs partnership. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman refused to say which model the Prime Minister prefers: though the

Friday

David Butterfield

Are grammar schools unfair?

Those dread words ‘Grammar schools’ are back in the news again. The education secretary, Damian Hinds, has today announced a new fund that will allow established academically selective schools, i.e. the 163 grammars clustered around the country, to found new ‘satellite’ schools. The proposal could increase pupil numbers at grammar schools by 16,000 over the next four years. The news has been met with the typical mixture of surprise and outrage; amidst the tried-and-tested to-and-fro, it is hard to find much reasoned and sustained argument. Everyone, it seems, knows where they – and everyone else – stand. But, dig a little deeper into the issues at stake, and Hinds is