Money

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

The real plan for inflation? To let it rip

Check out these hyperventilating headlines from last week: ‘What the Fed’s largest interest rate hike in decades means for you’ (PBS.org). ‘Federal Reserve interest rate hike opens new era for economy’ (Washington Post). ‘The Fed delivers biggest rate hike in decades to fight inflation’ (National Public Radio). ‘Fed goes for inflation’s jugular with 75bps rate hike’ (Schwab). While it’s true that the US Federal Reserve has not hiked its funds rate by 0.75 percentage points in one go since 1994, the figure prominently missing from those bug-eyed bulletins, and bizarrely unmentioned in all the television news coverage of this ostensibly bold move that I encountered, is what the Fed raised

Wednesday

Matthew Lynn

Inflation is a social evil, so why don’t our leaders care?

It was a ‘destroyer of society’, a ‘tax on ordinary people’s savings’ and a threat to social order. You don’t have to spend very long browsing the history books to find thumping quotes from Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher denouncing rising prices as an evil that had to be defeated. And today? Even with prices in the UK now rising at 9.1 per cent, the fastest for 40 years, there are just a few mumbled apologies, coupled with some evasive excuses. That is not good enough. If we are going to defeat inflation all over again, it will take some leadership. We learned today that inflation has nudged up again,

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

I’m being priced out of eating out

I used to be able to afford to go to restaurants. Yes, it was a treat, but it was just about doable, and though it was never a pleasure to be presented with the bill, it didn’t leave you reeling from shock and buyer’s remorse. The schnitzel in my favourite London restaurant has gone up from £12 to £20 for the small one and from £22 to £33 for the normal-sized one. Meanwhile, restaurants and pubs all over Britain no longer offer a mere hamburger. It has to be called a ‘short rib and flank burger, smoked Applewood Cheddar, shallot marmalade, garlic aioli and skin-on fries’ to justify its £17.50

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Is the Elizabeth line worth the cost?

It’s 8.16 on Tuesday morning and I’m actually writing this on a moving Elizabeth line train. Moving in the sense that we’ve just zipped from Paddington to Liverpool Street in 13 minutes – which if nothing else will be a boon for City commuters from west of London. Moving also in the sense that I’ve been writing about the project formerly known as Crossrail, first in optimism but later in frustration and rage, since its then chairman Terry Morgan gave me a personal tour of the Bond Street diggings back in June 2013. Now that the central section is open at last – even with its Bond Street station still

Thursday

Angus Colwell

The nihilistic rise of ‘loss porn’

It’s been a terrible few weeks for that guy you know. Bitcoin dropped to a ten-month low (apparently thanks to something called ‘stablecoins’), while $1 trillion has been wiped off the largest tech companies on the stock markets. ‘Retail investors’ – non-professionals with little more than an internet connection – are struggling. You might expect many of them to put their heads in their hands and log off. But that would be to misunderstand the nihilism of online culture. Losing is the same as winning, only better. The thing to do is to post evidence of your catastrophic losses. It’s called ‘loss porn’ and if you look at the ‘WallStreetBets’ page on

Stephen Robinson

Fraud victim? Don’t bank on getting your money back

Lloyds Bank has been running a new advertising campaign which updates its long-standing black horse corporate branding. The horses no longer thunder along a beach, but interact with people who we assume are actual or potential customers. The soothing payoff slogan goes: ‘Lloyds Bank. By your side.’ The latest episode features a girl who slightly puts me in mind of our 17-year-old daughter. She happens to bank with Lloyds, but there the happy parallel ends. On a Saturday afternoon in March, a person unknown withdrew £440 from our daughter’s account via an ATM. At that precise time, our daughter was playing her clarinet during an audition for a London orchestra.

Monday

Ross Clark

Crypto is dead

When Britain voted for Brexit, Macron boasted that Paris would eat the City of London’s lunch. It didn’t quite work out that way, with most league tables continuing to put London as the number one or two financial centre, with not a single EU city in the top ten. Emmanuel Macron’s government has now announced that it has invited Binance, a crypto exchange site, to set up a European HQ in Paris. You have to ask: has Macron leapt on a bandwagon which has already started to lose its wheels?  The warning sign for cryptocurrencies is not so much that they have crashed – Bitcoin is down 50 per cent from its peak last

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

The Biden Bust is here

A wave of government spending would reboot the economy. Fairer taxes would pay for restored infrastructure. Skills would be improved, productivity raised, and new digital champions would emerge. When Joe Biden was elected, he promised the most radical programme of economic reform since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, and, to his army of cheerleaders at least, the American economy was about to be completely transformed. But hold on. Only a year into his term, the reality is very different from the promises. In reality, the Biden Bust has arrived. Donald Trump may have been personally obnoxious, but he bequeathed an economy in perfectly good shape The US GDP figures

Tuesday

Annabel Denham

Why does the City still use quotas?

It sometimes feels like every regulatory body in Britain today misuses its influence to advance progressive causes. A welcome exception is the Financial Conduct Authority, which last week decided to allow firms to choose whether they use sex or gender as the definition of ‘woman’ for reporting on their representation on corporate boards. It is clearly not the role of a financial services regulator to attempt to define ‘man’ and ‘woman’. Out of 540 responses to a consultation on the matter, all but one said they did not want trans women to be automatically included in the targets and data. As the group Sex Matters has pointed out, there is

Thursday

Douglas Murray

I feel sorry for Rishi Sunak

Perhaps I should stress from the get-go that I do not know Rishi Sunak. So far as I know, we’ve only met once, some years ago when he was working at the think-tank Policy Exchange. He showed me to my seat when I arrived late for an event. It is one of those things you must get used to in this life – that the person you last saw helping you into a folding chair will just a few years later be Chancellor of the Exchequer. When I first noticed this tendency, a wise older friend cautioned me against feeling concern about it. Best to accept it as part of

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Should the young pay less tax than the old?

In evolutionary terms, it is obvious why we get more conservative with age. Two strong forces, acting in the same direction, lead us not to bet on rank outsiders when we’re nearing the last race of the day. First, older people have more experience to draw on when making decisions: if you already know what you like, the need to experiment is much less. But that’s not all. The elderly also have far less time remaining to benefit from experimentation. If you happen on a new cuisine, band, social circle or holiday destination in your twenties, you have many decades to profit from the discovery. Someone in their sixties might

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

We will never hear the end of Rishi’s tax cut

The bean-counters squared up in the Commons today. Chancellor Rishi Sunak delivered a terse spring statement which contained three major bombshells. And he was answered by Labour’s shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who unfurled a few surprises of her own. Sunak gave an upbeat assessment of Britain’s economy but warned that our growth is about to be clobbered by Putin’s Ukraine adventure. Sunak expects inflation to peak at 7 per cent, or more. That’s effectively a huge pay-cut for every citizen, not just those in work, and it may nudge us closer to a recession. But he kept the R-word to himself. Sunak seems to enjoy being liked and he was

Rishi Sunak

Rishi Sunak’s spring statement speech in full

Mr Speaker, As I stand here, men, women and children are huddled in basements across Ukraine seeking protection. Soldiers and citizens alike have taken up arms to defend their land and families. The sorrow we feel for their suffering, and admiration for their bravery is only matched by the gratitude we feel for the security in which we live. And what underpins that security is the strength of our economy. It gives us the ability to fund the armed forces we need to maintain our liberty. The resources we need to support our allies. The power to impose sanctions which cause severe economic costs. And the flexibility to support businesses

Tuesday

Robert Peston

What to expect at the spring statement

The big story of Wednesday’s spring statement by the Chancellor will be the impact of inflation – which has soared from almost zero just over a year ago to perhaps 10 per cent in coming months – on living standards and the public finances. I expect Rishi Sunak to provide limited protection from the ravages of inflation to those on low and middling incomes, probably by increasing universal credit and the threshold for paying national insurance.  But quite how far the Chancellor inflation-proofs the take home pay of low earners will be the most important question he will answer tomorrow. Inflation that makes all of us poorer will create the

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Rishi Sunak’s popularity test

Rishi Sunak ended 2021 as the most popular politician in the country. A YouGov poll for the final quarter of the year found that 31 per cent of all adults had a positive opinion of the Chancellor compared to 28 per cent for Nicola Sturgeon and 26 per cent for Boris Johnson. However, ending 2022 in the same situation looks rather ambitious.  As the cost of living crisis worsens, Sunak is under pressure both from the public and his own party to step in and ease the burden on households in tomorrow’s Spring Statement. A poll out today suggests he has plenty of work to do to convince voters he has the

Thursday

Javier Blas

The commodity kings: have traders finally discovered a moral compass?

Many people around the world were glued to their screens in horror on 4 March, as they watched Russian shells raining down on Ukrainian cities. On a trading floor in central London, the oil traders at Shell were also glued to their screens – but watching the price of Russian oil. It was becoming a lot cheaper than normal (Brent) oil, due to the understandable reluctance to support Putin. But then again, everyone has their price. The Shell traders watched, and waited, as every minute the price was lowered further– to a $23 a barrel discount, then a $24 discount, then a $25 discount. Finally, at around 4 p.m., the

Thursday

Lionel Shriver

Our monetary bubble is about to burst

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

Thursday

Peter Jones

The ancient problem of unscrupulous ‘doctors’

Yet again ‘doctors’ with no qualifications have been found advertising dodgy but expensive products and treatments, in this case, injections of unregulated Botox variants to remove wrinkles. Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) inveighed against such practices 2,000 years ago. Romans had a love-hate relationship with the Greeks, and medicine was no exception. In his massive Naturalis Historia — a 36-book encyclopaedia of the animal, vegetable and mineral world — Pliny acknowledged the enormous influence of Greek medical theory, i.e. that health required a balance between the four bodily liquids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) and their many associated ‘powers’ in matching groups of four (e.g. heat, cold,

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The Christian case for cash

Naysayers needed Sir: I was struck by James Forsyth’s observation that in 10 Downing Street, ‘hard truths and hard choices are too often ignored… because the Prime Minister’s top team fear he will find them uncomfortable’ (‘The battle to save Boris’, 22 January). During a working life spent in business, I came to realise that one of the most valuable skills you could master was how to tell someone things they would rather not hear while maintaining good relations with them. If the PM is intent on firing many of his staff, it would be prudent for whoever appoints their replacements to ensure that as many of them as possible

Thursday

Julian Jessop

The ONS’s inflation measurement change isn’t ‘new’

The way we measure inflation is changing, and there could hardly be a less crucial time for it to do so. The ONS will be updating the method for collecting individual prices from supermarkets, and will also publish new figures on inflation rates for different types of household. The anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe has tweeted that the ONS ‘have just announced that they are going to be changing the way they collect and report on the cost of food prices and inflation to take into consideration a wider range of income levels and household circumstances’. But Monroe, who hope that the new metrics will show that inflation is hitting poorer families harder, will